Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman

Don't Muddle Through. Get up and Do that Thing

3/22/2021

Dvar Torah Vayikra 5781

A few years ago when I worked at the day school in Denver, the head of the upper division the 6th to 12 grade , retired, and the school decided to elevate the assistant head of the upper division to his position. I remember that Jason was a big thinker - he loved those Thomas Friedman / Jared Diamond / Elon Musk / Ted Talk type books and podcasts about how a fundamental rethinking of an idea in society could remake everything. A favorite idea he had was how the American educational system, and the way it was segmented into discrete disciplines -math, science, english, history - was a product of the early 20th century Henry Ford industrial line compartmentalization of America. You didn’t need a guy to build a whole car - you needed a guy to drill four rivets into the crank shaft and bolt a plate onto the transmission, and move the car down the line for the next guy. Thus, a student in a school in the old days learned that history was one thing and science was another and never the two shall meet.

Well, Jason had been reading the best ideas of modern educators, who talked about project based learning and interdisciplinary classrooms and maker spaces for kids to explore and STEAM education - that’s an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math - and how all these big ideas were forcing innovation in American schools that would completely remake the world we live in. Jason was pumped. He had just been handed the keys to the school, and he had big ideas and dreams, and a plan, and he was set to innovate and transform.

A year later at the school, all of Jason’s plans were still there, sitting in a half-finished word document on his laptop. Not only had none of them been implemented, most of them hadn’t even been completed, or discussed in a meeting, or brought before the board. Because Jason was the head of the upper division. He got up an hour before everyone else and had to make sure the copier was on, the parking lot was free of snow, the teacher’s rooms were unlocked. He had to field parent emails, and phone calls, and staff meetings, and board meetings, and negotiate a truce between two feuding teachers. He had to find a substitute for spanish because the teacher didn’t show up, again, and he had to interview another teacher to replace the one that quit in english. He had to talk to the school counselor about the kid with suicidal ideation, and the judaics department about whether the budget would allow donuts on rosh chodesh. And then more parent emails and more phone calls. That’s no joke, a realistic *single day* as a principal at a school. By the way, if you haven’t personally told Avi Baran Munro or Mark Minkus or Andrea Erven Victoria what an amazing job they do, you should, because they do, and I don’t even work at CDS and I know it. Anyhow.

My point is - Jason got so busy doing the job, he never had time to look up and think about what the job was. He was constantly grinding. Constantly muddling through. There was a lot of forward motion and progress, but not a lot of asking the question ‘why are we doing this?’ or ‘is this the best way?’ My story, I want to add, is probably at least a slight oversimplification of matters. I also know that the school had a lot of teachers who might not have been up for the task of reinventing education for the 21st century, and the school was also often short on funds for even regular tasks, let alone a large structural revamping of everything. Nonetheless, I think the point still stands that muddling through is a pretty crummy way to go through life.

And we do this, as humans, a lot. We muddle through. We are often both busily consumed by the things we have to do or the way we have habituated ourselves to doing things such that we no longer notice if it’s even worth doing. Some of that is of course necessary - stuff has to get done, and broad flights of fancy are often timely distractions from the grunt work of life. Additionally, the person who gets excited about one career choice and then changes to a new passion and then another and another is not so much a bold person following their bliss as much as they are flighty and possibly unreliable. The only person who is allowed to want to be a fireman on monday, an astronaut on wednesday, and an artist on friday is a six year old kid.

That said, we need to be able to take stock every now and again, to just drop in and see what condition our condition is in.

This week’s Torah portion of Vayikra is the official transition out of narrative driven stories in the Torah - no more exciting characters struggling through moral quandaries or leadership challenges, with one or two exceptions. Vayikra, aka leviticus , is mostly a book of laws of holiness, connection, and meaning. It starts with this week’s parsha, which deals with offerings that are brought to the mishkan, the portable desert tabernacle. Which is, as you can imagine, fairly esoteric and irrelevant material for moderns, since we no longer have a tabernacle or a temple or sacrifices or a priesthood to administer them. My favorite brand of Jewish thinkers are the Hassidim - 18th and 19th century Eastern European thinkers who look at the Torah text with two main outlooks: first, what could this text mean personally for me, for my own growth and self-improvement, and second, what mystical, kabbalist, or spiritual meaning could this text offer in a manner that is timeless? And that’s where we come to our discussion of the asking of the essential question of the purpose of what we are doing.

Lev. 1:3 reads:
אִם־עֹלָה קָרְבָּנוֹ מִן־הַבָּקָר זָכָר תָּמִים יַקְרִיבֶנּוּ אֶל־פֶּתַח אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד יַקְרִיב אֹתוֹ *לִרְצֹנוֹ* לִפְנֵי יְהוָה׃
If one’s offering is an Olah (burnt; rising; elevated) offering from the herd, one shall make their offering a male without blemish. They shall bring it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, for acceptance to the desire - the ratzon - before the LORD.
To which our commentators across the ages, from the Talmud to the Medieval to Hassidic and the Modern all get tripped up. What does it mean for God to have ratzon - desire - for a thing? What does God want? Moreover, are we sure we’re talking about what God wants - the text actually reads for his desire - which could mean the desire of God, or the desire or the offerant. And if so, what might we speculate about the desire of a person bringing an Olah offering before the Lord?
Additionally, there is the question of this Olah offering - the rules of this offering, one of roughly 7 types of offerings brought at the Mishkan - make it so that it is the only one in which the sacrifice is wholly burnt and consumed by fire. The word ‘olah’ means ‘goes up’ or ‘elevates’, and so of course our friends the Hassidim are going to go after its spiritual relevance to us, here and now, despite the fact that none of you will be torching an entire side of beef on your backyard bar-be-ques this week in offering to HaShem.

Our friend The Maggid of Medzeritch, Reb Dov Ber ben Avraham , who died in 1772 and was a contemporary of the originator of Hassidut, the Baal Shem Tov, tells us the following:

“If one elevates - Olah -, one offers themselves” , if a person desires to raise oneself up from a lowly madrega (spiritual state), to raise themselves up and transcend - “be brought for acceptance before God” , one should bring their own desires before God.

The Maggid of Medzeritch, Dov Ber ben Avraham , d. 1772

יקריב את רצונו לפני יהוה -
*one should bring their own desires before God*. This is the command to break from our muddling through and going about things out of happenstance, and to take a break and get ourselves over and above - a 30,000 foot view of the situation. What do we want? What does God want? Are they aligned? Are these the right things to want and desire and pursue?
The spiritual state that we crave is tied up in being contemplative about our purpose and our motivation. That means in everything. One might ask this professionally on occasion- what is the goal and mission of my organization, and might I make an adjustment that will go in a better direction? One might ask this communally, as we saw in an article this week in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle about how Covid has created some city-wide organizational re-thinking around space usage and collaboration between different Jewish institutions. Our own Rabbi Amy Bardack and Rabbi Seth Adelson and Jeff Finkelstein were quoted as part of that rethinking - but it’s part of the spiritual conversation of what do we desire and how do those desires align with our sacred Jewish mission?
And personally, the question of our own ratzon - our own sacred desire to fulfill our purpose - is there too. Maybe we’re a little stuck in our prayer practice, or we’ve fallen by the wayside in torah learning. Maybe we’re unhappy professionally, or personally, or religiously, with the way things have been going. Maybe we’re not the best parents, or children, or spouses that we could be. Maybe our desires have been too inwardly focused, and fail to elevate and improve the lives of other people in an outwardly focused manner, and we need to be more involved in the work of tzedakah and gmilut chassadim. What we are doing is un-aligned with what we want to be doing, or what we do is a lot of hustled busywork and meaningless emails that does not actually contribute to our own desire of being personally and spiritually elevated - an olah - in the idea of the Maggid of Medzeritch. To quote Cher in Moonstruck -SLAP - “Snap out of it.” Wake up and consider how to align your ratzon with the ratzon of the ratzon of the borei - make your desires of a higher purpose such that they are parallel to the reason you were created by your Creator.

Pesach and spring are a time for freedom and rebirth. Your freedom and rebirth are dependant on your own ability to self-examine your own motivations for being your best self. Stop muddling through like a slave, spend some time before pesach taking stock of what you want and what you need to be your best self. Go out and examine what your Promised land is, and how to get there.
Shabbat Shalom

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Yom Kippur 5781 - Reparations

9/28/2020

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In 1943, my grandmother Rachel and her sister Gela fled their hometown of Rakov with fake papers provided by a local official, leaving behind the only home they’d ever known for an uncertain future as they traveled west searching for work. They were the only survivors of a massacre of the town’s residents by the Polish population. My grandmother surmises that the Nazis had encouraged the Poles to commit the atrocity, and the Poles, motivated by greed, killed the Jews in order that they be able to take their houses and their goods. My grandmother Rachel, pretending to be a Polish Catholic, spent the next year working on a farm outside of Munchengladbach, until the Allies liberated Western Germany sometime around late November in 1944. At the age of 16, she and her sister were hustled off to Brussels and made their way to North America in 1946.

Around that time, or sometime before, other Polish Jews who had been deported to concentration camps attempted to return to their homes and reclaim their property from the Poles who had taken it from them. They were denied, violently. The most famous example of this was the Kielce massacre which took place on July 4, 1946, killing 42 Jews. The Jewish population of Poland emptied out afterwards - 20,000 people left in just the month of July, leaving a total of just 12,000 Jews in all of Poland. Only a scant minority returned to their own homes or reclaimed the property that was taken from them.

I imagine you already know this, but my grandmother and her sister were never compensated for the home they lost, or the furniture or valuables that were pilfered. They certainly were not compensated for the deaths of their mother, father, two brothers, and sister. And they were not paid for the year of slave labor they did as farm hands harvesting the grain and produce that fed the German Army. And realistically, neither my grandmother, nor her three children, nor her six grandchildren have ever sought to collect damages from Poland, or the residents of Rakov, or the Germans. We don’t fall into the convenient categories for which German reparations have been earmarked, and we don’t have any documentation, because the idea that my grandmother would have been asking for receipts as she fled for her life is patently absurd. We don’t plan to collect damages from Poland because Poland has spent the last 75 years denying that they were perpetrators, and rather telling the world that they were only victims of the Nazis. There is no recouping of loss from someone that denies they wronged you in the first place. Poland lives in a state of constant, widespread Holocaust denial. They say ‘it’s not our problem.’ They can, if they choose to, also argue that it was so long ago, and that the modern Polish citizen was not culpable. Guilt disappears by fading and receding into the past like the light slips away from day until it becomes dusk, and then dark. If you cannot see it, it is not there.

My family has carried the story of our escape from Rakov - we are the only known surviving family of the village - with unease. My grandmother did not speak of it, except only on a few rare occasions. But we all inherited some aspect of the trauma my grandmother experienced. Moreso than the trauma, we have carried the anger. When I was kid, I was informed by my grandmother, on multiple occasions, never to go back to Poland; never to try and visit her town or see when she was from. Poland was a place of ghosts. It was a place of wicked people. It was to my grandmother, the personification of evil as a physical place. When we took my grandmother to see Schindler’s List, after the credits, my grandmother said only one thing ‘Too many Poles.’ She was mad that Steven Speilberg had used too many locals on the film crew for the movie.

I want to be clear - my grandmother doesn’t want money. Nothing can right the wrongs of the past. And my mother doesn’t need the money - she’s got her pension from the LA Unified school district, and she’s set. And I don’t need the money, although I do still have about 9 more years till I pay off my rabbinical school student loans. But there’s a sense that a sin was committed. And it was simply swept under the rug; nothing to see here, no real crime, folks. We just pretend like those Poles always lived in those houses and owned those nice candlesticks, and turn our heads, and go on. It feels wrong to me. It will always feel wrong to me until something flips the narrative - Poland denies its guilt, and my family goes on carrying our intergenerational anger. Wrong is wrong, until someone tries to make it right.

Our Torah portion this week contains the well-known story of the daughters of Zelophehad - Machlah, Hoglah, Milchah, Noa, Tirtzah - whose father dies. In Numbers 27 the women say to Moses and Aaron
“Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korah’s faction, which banded together against God, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons.
Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!”
Moses brought their case before God.
And God said to Moses,
The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just: you should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen; transfer their father’s share to them.”

The implication in the story is that property had passed from father to son only, but never from father to daughter. In fact, had the women not interceded, Zelophechads property was to go to his brothers children. But the women said *‘that’s wrong’*

So Moses took it up with God, and God said ‘they’re right. Compensate them.’ The wrong was righted.

There is a further concept within Torah which speaks to the concepts of right and wrong and property and inheritance, and that is the principle of the land of Israel belonging to the entirety of the people of Israel. The land was apportioned to each of the tribes and all of the families upon entry as an eternal possession. As the Torah tells us in Genesis 17,
וְנָתַתִּי לְךָ וּלְזַרְעֲךָ אַחֲרֶיךָ אֵת אֶרֶץ מְגֻרֶיךָ אֵת כָּל־אֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן לַאֲחֻזַּת עוֹלָם
I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding.” In fact, the word inheritance appears in the five books of the Torah 322 times. In a huge number of those references, we are told that the land of Israel is the everlasting possession of all of the people, for all times sake. Every person receives an equal share of the land in which they live, and the bounty which it produces, and no one can take that away. That which God has granted to the people may not be deprived to them by the wrongful acts and human hands. The daughters of Zelophechad are an echo of this principle - when humans seek to deprive others of equal inheritance, God Godself steps in to right the wrong. You might already know this, but in case you didn’t, the story of the daughters of zelophechad is exception in Torah in that it is the only place when a mitzvah is given at Sinai, then appealed elsewhere in Torah directly to God, ultimately resulting in the overturning of the law and the reapportionment of property. God never before and never after intervenes to modify one of the 613 commandments.

America is currently in the throes of great turmoil over the treatment of its Black citizens, whose experience in this country is the history of overcoming unbelievable hardship, from slavery to Jim Crow to lynchings to segregation to red lining to economic inequality to murder at the hands of police officers. We are, in essence, engaged in a 400 year battle against our nations original sin which began when in 1619 the first Negro slaves came off a ship from Africa, manacles around their necks and hands and feet, to be auctioned off to build the agrarian economy of the South into a powerhouse that would ultimately fuel America’s rise to become one of the worlds great nations. They were never compensated for the loss of their freedom. They were never compensated for the deaths of their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and brothers in the holds of the ships or by the whip. They were never paid for their labor - for 250 years they weren’t paid. Slaves literally built the building that serves as the most powerful office on the planet, the home of the president of the United States, the White House. And they never even got a thin dime out of the deal.

I know some of you are now beginning to become uncomfortable. You may be uncomfortable to have history framed in a way in which America is not ‘one great nation , indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’ but rather a nation that has done wrong. Or you may be uncomfortable because the idea that I am presenting is a difficult one to wrap your mind around. When people hear the word ‘reparations’ - they immediately think ‘how is handing out free money fair?’ They think ‘but who will pay for that?’ And I hear you. I used to think that way too.

But I think the first step in moving towards justice for Blacks in America is opening up to the possibility that whatever we’ve been doing to this point - with policing and mass incarceration and economic and educational inequality - is not working. The progress that has been made for Blacks in this country between Rodney King in 1991 and George Floyd in 2020 is negligible - in 30 years, we’ve barely moved the needle. So if the only thing I accomplish in this dvar torah is encourage you to think long and hard about reparations, that’s enough.

The idea of this sermon - of reparations - is of course quite appropriate to the overall themes of our high holidays - of doing teshuvah, repentance. Jewish notions of proper repentance ; as you all surely know ; go well beyond simply saying you’re sorry and promising never to do it again. When monetary property has been misappropriated, uncompensated, or stolen, the Talmud prescribes that the person that does the wrong must make some form of restitution for the loss that they cause. America took advantage of the labor of Black Americans for 240 years, and then, with the end of slavery, declared that the wrong had been righted. There was a famous call by General Sherman during the Civil War to reapportion seized plantations to slaves in 1865, the so-called ‘40 acres and a mule’, but in practice, it never happened, and post-Civil War reconstruction backslid into a system of injustice and economic inequality without any manner of reparations. Reparations of some kind for Black Americans would be the final and long-awaited conclusion to America’s process of teshuvah - a true and proper conclusion to a moral failing of our nation that still extends its reach into many aspects of our modern life.

To the startling and heartbreaking facts of inequality in America, the issue of wealth and inheritance, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the starkest and most instructive about why the idea of reparations should be considered. As Ta-nehesi Coates has described it, “The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.” After you know that fact, and you take into account what kind of neighborhoods blacks live in, what kind of education they can afford to pay for, what kind of jobs they are qualified to get, what kind of opportunities are afforded to them or denied to them, you begin to see that for most people, starting with very little will almost certainly lead to them earning very little, and passing on very little. The cycle is perpetuated.

I am not here to explain what reparations look like, or how to pay for them. It is well outside of my field of expertise. I also cannot even begin to elucidate the many, many historical disadvantages that the average Black person in America today is battling. The number of injustices is so vast that it would take a four-year college course of study to even scratch the surface. I will simply direct you to the essay in The Atlantic by Tanehesi Coates from 2014 entitled ‘The Case for Reparations’. When services are over, sit down and read it. I guarantee, you will be better for it.

Nevertheless, short of making you all do the assigned reading and come back tomorrow to write me an essay,
I do think it is fairly uncontroversial for me to state unequivocally that when it comes to how America, meaning you and me, have treated Blacks in this country, a wrong has committed, and an effort should be made to make it right. And that simple idea - the acceptance of the notion that we ought to right a wrong - is the first critical step towards reparations. I don’t know what exactly reparations look like, but we ought to make a good faith effort to begin the conversation. Maybe Black first time homeowners should get a good chunk of a down payment; maybe Black undergraduate and technical college education should be free. Maybe it’s as simple as a one-time check to the descendants of slaves. Maybe it’s small and symbolic. Maybe it’s large and reshapes American society. I don’t know.

I do know two things, though.

First, just a chapter after the daughters of Zelophechad, the Torah delineates a series of sacrificial offerings the Israelites are to bring to God at holidays, including that line in the Mussaf service in Sim Shalom that says ‘some skip this part’ about the offering of
“שְׁנֵי־כְבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה תְּמִימִם , two yearling lambs without blemish”
But it also includes mention of sin offerings - the offering a person makes when they did something wrong and they need to make it write. The Torah in Numbers 28:22 tells us
"וּשְׂעִיר חַטָּאת אֶחָד לְכַפֵּר עֲלֵיכֶם׃"
“And there shall be one goat for a sin offering, to make expiation in your behalf.”

The Torah typically speaks in sparse language, so the final few words in that sentence - ‘to make expiation in your behalf’ - seem notable because they raise up the concept that there is some kind of need for a financial penalty in order to assuage the guilt of an original wrongdoing. It is ‘l’kapper alecheim’ - it atones for you. The process in Judaism of forgiveness from sin is in giving something up in exchange - it acknowledges the wrongdoing; it attempts to put a semblance of a price on it; and somehow, it allows the victim and the perpetrator to move on. I used the most proximal example, but the Torah is full of examples between human and human where injustice is rebalanced through monetary compensation. Wrong is wrong, until someone makes it right.

And second, I know my family hasn’t forgiven Poland. And I think it likely that I will instruct my children never to go there - never to spend a penny of our families money in that place - unless some attempt is made to right the original sin that was done to our family by that country and its citizens. I will pass on our trauma and our anger to the fourth generation of my family for the simple reason that nobody has ever said ‘I’m sorry. Here is a small token by which we acknowledge that we did wrong.’ Reparations for us wouldn’t be a handout or a payoff. It would simply be an admission of guilt, and a step in the right direction towards justice, and maybe someday, forgiveness.

America is the greatest country in the world. Or at least, it ought to be. In order to be great, we need to set the example of what it is to be just and moral. Again, to quote Ta-nehesi Coates, “To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.” We can’t fix what ails us by renaming an NFL team or pulling down a statue - we need to look deeper and harder at ourselves. Poland may think that guilt will fade into the darkness and disappear, but we know better. A wrong that isn’t righted festers like a sore. A debt that is unpaid never goes away.

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Time - Rosh Hashanah 5781

9/27/2020

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HH 5781 - Time

For much of our lives, the function of Shabbat and holidays, the recurring rhythms of Jewish time, functioned in our lives as a measuring device - a yardstick or a barometer. We went to work, we went to school, we took trips, we saw friends. Jewish time was a departure from those new and varying experiences - we came to the same place, and said the same words. The rituals of regularity allow us to reflect on the ups and downs of our exciting daily existence.

The past six months has been a total reversal of this paradigm. We now go nearly nowhere. We do very little. The past six months has not been denoted by new experiences. It has been about hunkering down; about the mundane day to day necessitated by reducing our exposure to others. New and unfamiliar has been replaced by repetitive and regular.

Our lives are all suspended in a state of lost wandering where we spend so much of our time looking forward to the quote “end of quarantine” and when we can quote “get back to normal”. Everyday in our homes is a kind of mundane sameness. I think I’ll see what’s on Netflix. Let me bake something. I’ll read the latest headlines in the newspaper. Whoops that was a bad decision; now I’ll need to stress-eat most of that cake I just baked. Oh hey look, I’m on another zoom call. Is this one morning prayer or the class I’m taking or my kids piano lesson or an actual work meeting. Maybe when that’s over I’ll take a walk. Maybe I’ll walk around the block clockwise today instead of counterclockwise - that’ll be a switch. And so on and so on, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

For me, the only exciting variation to the past few months, other than a camping trip with my kids to West Virginia in June and perhaps binging ‘Tiger King’ back in April, is prayer in a virtual synagogue, like this. Synagogue is no longer the marker of the week that allows me to rest and ponder the meaning of the experiences I just had the past six days - synagogue is the experience itself. Heschel once called Shabbat ‘a palace in time’, but during Quarantine, the week is the palace, and shabbat is the day of venturing out into the fields to see what is new with the world. Shabbat and holidays are not a respite from experience, it is the experience itself.

There is a temptation, then, for all of us to look beyond the current moment, and to crave the time in the future when we have all been vaccinated and can take off our masks and get on an airplane safely again.

My parents and my in-laws keep calling and looking forward to when we can fly to California or Israel so they can see their grandchildren in person again. Everytime my kids is a favorite Disney song, they ask if we can go to Disneyland when this is all over. Me? I just want to sit at the local soccer bar with a cold beer and Arsenal Football Club on the TV, quietly watching as they once again blow a 2-1 lead at the death and slump once again back into 5th place.

But all of this conceiving of the experience as a ‘temporary pause’ is possibly counter-productive. All of this yearning for things to come rather than what is now is detrimental to our sense of being. Time passes for all of us - when the pandemic is over, we will be a year older. And if we had spent that time lamenting over what we could have been doing if not for Covid-19, we will have wasted that time. To paraphrase a quote of the great musician Thom Yorke - we’re not living, we’re just killing time.

Perhaps you could be spending this year writing the great American novel, but that’s not really what I mean by all of this. I mean to say that we ought to re-experience this time on a different wavelength. It’s slower. It’s more introspective. There’s more time to ponder and reflect.

We all know the expression that time flies when you’re having fun, and we have all felt the sense of time contracting when we want it last and conversely the hands of the clock dragging at a snails pace when we were doing something tedious and dull. Time feels relative. I’m not a theoretical physicist, but I know enough to understand the Cliffs Notes version of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. One of the principles is the following: Einstein's theory of special relativity says that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. Approaching the speed of light, a person inside a spaceship would age much slower than his twin at home. Also, under Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity can bend time. While Covid has not produced literal effects upon the gravity of the earth, it has demonstrated a degree of relativity regarding time - all the days are not the same. These newer, slower days must be conceived of differently than our previous “normal” days. We must find new understandings in order to establish meaning for our days, rather than just hope to endure them.

I’ve spent the past 9 months teaching myself new things - for me. I’ve been praying more, and meditating more, and doing more yoga. I learned to make a pretty good mojito. And I’m reading a lot more Hassidut - a certain type of Jewish literature that attempts to make every text of the Torah personally meaningful. For a traditional commentator, the story of Joseph being thrown in an empty well elicits questions of what the well was like, or how long he was down there. For the Hasidim, the question is about what our experiences of emptiness are like, and how we can fill that space.
In one of the Torah portions from this past summer, Shofetim, in the book of Deuteronomy, one of the disciples of the originator of Hassidut, the Baal Shem Tov, takes apart the opening verse ‘Shofetim v’shotrim titan lecha’. The rabbi, Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polonne, known as the Toldot Ya’akov Yosef, says the following:

You shall appoint magistrates and officials for you -
L’cha - to you, to yourself. Before you judge yourself, say something nice about yourself.
And, with the same measure of merit that you assess yourself, do the same for others. Don’t be lenient about yourself and strict with others. Forgive and be lenient with yourself, and be sure that with others, you are not splitting hairs and requiring from them what you are not requiring from yourself. “B’Chol Sh’arecha - In all your gates” - In all your assessments and measures of yourself.

This kind of approach to text is about constant, rigorous personal examination. It asks the reader to be introspective about their ways and their thoughts. It works nicely for quarantine in that - if I am only going to have limited face-to-face human interactions in a given day, I can use my textual introspections to make each of those interactions deeper, and perhaps a little more ethical and kind.

Deuteronomy 20:5-7, has a more explicit link to this topic of how we conceive of our time ; in we learn the following:
5) Then the officials shall address the troops, as follows: “Is there anyone who has built a new house but has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another dedicate it.
6) Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard but has never harvested it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another harvest it.
7) Is there anyone who has paid the bride-price for a wife, but who has not yet married her? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another marry her.”
The question our Torah poses to these warriors is the same as the question my children ask about Disneyland: is there someplace else you’d rather be? Except to some degree, the question is the inverse of our situation. The soldiers are told: before you is a great adventure, a dangerous experience, a mighty battle. But perhaps you have unfinished business at home. Therefore, return and finish that business. Settle your affairs.
We are in the inverse situation. We are not permitted to sally forth from our homes, except us essential workers or to pick up the groceries or the take-out. We must remain home. And therefore we ought to make use of it. To settle our affairs. To find ways of making the time meaningful through books or podcasts, through reconnecting with friends or becoming closer with our over the fence or across the street neighbors. We might be caring for children or older relatives full-time or trying to manage digital distance learning or home schooling, but we must also make time for ourselves, to make the most of this slow time in a way so that we come out of things having gained something from the experience. We do not get the time back at the end of this pandemic. The year will not have waited for us.

The paradox of this, on this day, is that under the guidance of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the various medical experts with whom they have consulted, we had to shorten up our services. This is for two reasons; first, that for those watching on Zoom at home, we have learned of the concept of ‘Zoom fatigue’ - that at a certain point, more becomes less, the eyes glaze over, and no matter how brilliant my sermon or how beautiful the congregational melody or how timeless the traditions of our synagogue and our faith, you lose the trees for the forest. In the words of the Talmud, you try and grasp too much, and you grasp nothing. The second reason is that the odds of the transmission of airborne illness increases with duration, so while I, a layperson might openly ask ‘really? A 3 hour service is actually more dangerous than a service that’s an hour and a half? The answer coming from doctors is “yes, rabbi, it really is.” I suspect that, for some of you, me dialing back my long winded High Holiday soliloquies is actually a relief. But if a majority of you feel cheated, please let Doris know, and I will make sure to give a series of 45 minute long sermons next year after we all get a vaccine. Nonetheless the point still stands - we seize this special time by elevating it, even if, this year, there is less to elevate.
One of the more stirring prayers of the High Holidays is of course the Unetanah Tokef, a piyyut composed likely sometime in the 8th century, the earliest version of which was found in the famous Cairo Geniza by Solomon Schechter. Towards the end of the liturgical poem one finds a series of stirring images that are borrowed from various verses from the Tanakh. The text reads

This text gives us a three-fold reflection on the meaning of time and taking stock of time during this quiet interlude of quarantine and travel restriction. First, it reminds us that time is previous, “like a passing shadow, a fading cloud”, which is not coming back.

But second, this piyyut is a juxtaposition of the fragility of humans and the dearness of our lives. All of the images presented, the pottery and the flower and the vanishing dream, neither last long nor are paragons of strength and virility. There is a more intense and terrifying refrain for Unetaneh Tokef, the famous ‘who shall live and who shall die’ section, which contains in it the emmanently relevant section for this year ‘who by fire and who by water, who by earthquake and who by plague’, but I like this section better. It subtly reminds us that our mortality, like a bit of pottery, is easily broken unless we take care to protect it.
And third, the whole point of all of these poetic references to mortality is to contrast it with the Holy One, Blessed Be, The sovereign living God, ever-present. To consider our own mortality for a moment is valuable, but to grant ourselves a moment to contemplate a Divine being with no beginning and no end, and no illness or fragility, and no death at all, gives us all a moment to reflect on the awesome concept of God in a world where we sometimes get lost in irrelevant silliness. Which brings us right back to the whole point of Rosh Hashanah, and this sermon, that we might in the words of the Psalms (Psalm 90:12)
Teach us to number our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart.
As we go into Hebrew Year 5781, Let us meet the year head on and with purpose. Let us make it a stirring wind rather than a fleeting breeze, and a lush pasture rather than some withered grass. Let us use our time in these slow days to get more out of life, rather than wait to experience it when quarantine ends, when it will also inevitably speed up and give us less time to reflect.

Shanah Tovah

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Divrei Torah

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