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It’s not Politics. It’s Morality. And Life.

1/24/2025

It’s not Politics. It’s Morality. And Life.

Occasionally we talk in synagogue about spicy topics in which folks have a difference of opinions. We hold the space for slightly uncomfortable discussions. And not everyone likes when I frame things in this manner. Over the course of my 19 year career, folks have sometimes said “I don’t like it when the rabbi talks politics from the bimah”. (Yes, I know you all think I’m so young! Take a look at my beard, though, and you’ll notice there’s a lot of grey in there.)

And it’s true that politics doesn’t belong on the bimah. Candidates for office should vye for your vote without using the sensitive and personal heartstrings of religion to influence you. Rabbis and pastors should not become shills for a current politician with promises that might, for the moment, align with what a faith teaches.

But morals belong on the bimah. And life belongs on the bimah. Otherwise, it’s just empty words.

Our tradition asks us, over and over and over again, to be moral, just, and compassionate. “Care for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow.” “Every person was created in the image of God.” “Do not pervert justice.” “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Open, open your hand to the needy.” “The life of a mother precedes the life of her unborn fetus.” Lift up the poor and set free the captive.” “May the One who makes peace in heavens make peace on earth.” “We must build a world of lovingkindness.” “Do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” These are core tenets of our religion.

And so when we talk in synagogue about our morals, and about life: about immigrant expulsion; about protecting and affirming Trans, Lesbian, and Gay individuals; about health care for low-income folks; about women’s right to bodily autonomy; about war in Gaza ; about the priority of freeing hostages; about income inequality or tax policy for the rich; about the importance of education and libraries and universities; about free speech and freedom or religion; we are speaking Torah. We are affirming the 5,000 year old values of our people.

And so if it just so happens that the morals and values we affirm in our synagogues run counter to the things that politicians say or push through the legislative or executive branch, oh well. We cannot – we should not – we will not – apologize for practicing our beliefs, while individuals with primary motives of self-interest espouse other, anti-religious anti-morality. When some pundit proclaims the words of compassion and justice uttered by a brilliant spiritual leader like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde are ‘woke’, we should just chuckle and shake our heads.

Go ahead. Call us ‘woke’. I assure you, in the long history of our people, we have certainly been called much worse – and primarily because we have always been a voice for right and humanity in times when those principles were decidedly unpopular.

So if we talk about current events and the politics of the day at synagogue over the coming months and years, and we will, keep your focus. Our religion compels us to consider others needs before our own in a dozen specific and critical ways. Just because the political winds are blowing in a different direction doesn’t mean we will grow mute in the face of injustice and immorality.

Our God is just and compassionate. Torah is our focus. Nothing can or should convince us otherwise.

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Eulogy for Marilyn Stern

1/21/2025

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Hesped Marilyn Stern

As some of you may know, each Wednesday morning for the past six years, I had the distinct pleasure of teaching Marilyn Stern in a class we called ‘Life and Text’. I say ‘we’ here because Marilyn was one of the original members of class that helped decide the format and even the name of the class. The class is ostensibly a very standard Jewish offering you will find in many synagogues across the globe; a parshat hashavua class on the weekly reading in the Hebrew Bible. But of course, our class is also a gathering space and a support group, a social club, a place for uplift and moral and spiritual exploration, and an education for both the students and the teacher in the ways and methods of Hassidic philosophy.

But Marilyn, in her very Marilyn way, made the class into something greater, both for her and for all of us. And in that she became, on many occasions, my teacher.

She had two very persistent approaches to the class.

The first was as textual critic. A spiritual reading of a biblical text is typically a meditation and an exploration to be pondered and appreciated. But on occasion, not always, but occasionally, Marilyn would raise her hand in the dark wood paneling of our conference room on the second floor of Beth Shalom and say plainly “I have a problem with this text.” And then she would pick apart why the commentator was in error for understanding a verse a certain way or by utilizing a misshapen or wonky type of logic. If it didn’t ring true, or it wasn’t elegant, or was too simplistic, then Marilyn would critique it, like any type of literature, as if this long dead Polish spiritual master was like any other student in her classroom: one who received a B on the assigned essay, but needed proper direction as to how it could be improved.

The second was as a grammatical and linguistic stickler. Every Hassidic text in our class is from a group of 18th and 19th century Eastern European rabbis who may or may not have been an adept writer; and they are all translated by me. So when Marilyn would say “That’s not the right word” or “That’s not how that word should used”, I could never tell if Marilyn was critiquing the 18th century rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, or critiquing my inelegant translation of Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl. This was Marilyn, in her element. She wanted the language to be precise and clean, and she wanted to push you to be your best. And even in retirement, she was forever and always, first and foremost, a teacher, and proud of it.

Marilyn Stern was born March 12, 1949, in Rochester, NY. She attended Skidmore College for undergraduate, and then Boston University and Boston College for advanced degrees in Broadcasting & Film, and English, and Drama. She had a lifelong passion for music, and was an accomplished singer. She taught and was an administrator at Maimonides High School in Brookline and Wentworth Institute of Technology in Jamaica Plain, where she had what was the sometimes thankless task of demonstrating the beauty of literature and fiction to future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. From 1981 until her retirement in 2017, she set herself to the task of convincing her students of the value of writing, and of words.

While she was getting her degrees and at the outset of her teaching career, she was also a loving and committed mother, first to Matthew, who came along in 1978, and then Melissa, who was born in 1981. Her two children emphasized that their mother took pains to carve out a teaching schedule that still allowed her to pick up the kids at school and to make dinner and be with her children, even if that meant sometimes then rushing back out the door for an evening class.

Marilyn’s love for the written word was impressed upon Matthew and Melissa. They were allowed and encouraged to read anything and everything. Toys she wasn’t that keen on buying, it seemed, but Matthew and Melissa never wanted for reading material. Melissa recounted that as a child she liked the Sweet Valley High series of books, and one day Marilyn happened upon a garage sale with the entire series for sale. She bought them all and brought them home.

Marilyn also loved music, and singing, and perhaps in another life that might have been her profession. She studied in a conservancy and was a proud member of the Hebrew chorale Zamir in Boston for many years. Her daughter recounted that when she was in synagogue and sang along with the service or the cantor, heads would turn from all the surrounding rows to see who it was with the big booming, professionally trained voice.

She instilled in her children a strong moral compass. She was honest and fair, and as the child of a bookkeeper, Matthew noted, she made sure that her income taxes were paid exactly as they should be, taken no undue deductions or tax breaks.

She cared deeply about the Jewish value of hachnasat orchim, of hosting guests. Her table at passover was full to overflowing. Melissa recounted that their home in Needham once hosted 37 people for dinner, all to taste the many delicious things that Marilyn cooked.

Marilyn was also a great cook, something she proudly inherited from her mother, although her children implied that Marilyn’s mother’s baking skills passed to her sister, Ellen. Her tzimmes, and her blackened chicken wings, and her chicken soup , especially her chicken soup, were exceptional and something that everybody looked forward to. One of the funny paradoxes, however, of Marilyn’s chicken soup is that it had no written recipe. Matthew and Melissa told me that it was a pinch of this and dash of that, and it always was fantastic, but there wasn’t a precise recipe that she following. This is, I might note, a little like writing, in that although precision is deeply important, there isn’t an exact science to it, and every written work is going to be a little different from the last. Writing, and cooking, and singing - are all a nice microcosm of living. They are composed of the somewhat equal parts art, and science, and magic, and precision, and experimentation.

When Marilyn retired in 2017, she chose to move to Pittsburgh to be near her youngest two grandchildren, Moses and Lillith and she was the most devoted, most loving grandparent to them and before that to Matthew’s two children, Ida and Abbie. During the Covid pandemic she took care of Moses and Lillith while Melissa and Mark were working as essential workers. Our class continued on Zoom, and every once in a while Marilyn would interrupt a thought on a text by Simcha Bunim of Peshisecha with asking Mo if he wanted more lunch. Marilyn’s health was sensitive at that time, but her devotion to her grandchildren was so absolute that her caring for them was a foregone conclusion even though it posed some risk to herself. She was very selfless in that way, guided by a love that was supreme and boundless.

The Torah portion this week covers Moses and Aaron’s early cajoling of Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go out from slavery to freedom. The commentators note that it is a bit strange that God chose Moses to confront Pharoah despite the fact that he claims lo ish devarim anochi - “oh please God, I am not a man of words”, and yet God selects Moses anyhow. God nonetheless also selects Aaron to go with him, even though God only appeared to Moses. Aaron can only speak to Pharaoh removed once from the source, as a second-hand witness. This creates a strange tension in the text about who and how and whether the word of God can be properly conveyed to Pharaoh, either by Moses, or by Aaron.

The eminent bible scholar and Cambridge PhD in English literature Aviva Zornberg explains this as a problem with the precision and conveyance of language. She writes: “But the problem of language is given great resonance: there is no escape from the imperative of language, because only he has seen and heard. The burden of revelation lies directly on him: only he can speak of what he knows, This means a project of translation: he must make God’s words heard by others. To speak always means to translate, to transform; even the most faithful translations are betrayals: il traductore e traditore - to translate is to betray. Human speech represents; it images. None can, none may give God utterance. Oh, word, word, word that I lack!”

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This is a lovely reflection of both Moses’ task in conveying to Pharaoh the right words that God desires, and the great lifes work of Marilyn Stern in crafting the right words and instilling others to craft the right words, and to read the right words, and to love the right words.

Marilyn loved all literature, and the five books of moses are of course the preferred text of the Jewish people for reflection and meaning. Marilyn’s favorite works were Shakespeare, though, so I will leave her, and us, with this small piece from my favorite William Shakespeare play, Hamlet, in a scene in the second act where he meets again with his friends Rosencrans and Guildenstern.

Hamlet says, in greeting Rosencrantz, the following:

That you must teach me. But let me conjure you by the rights
of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the
obligation of our ever-preserved love, and by what more dear a
better proposer could charge you withal, be even and direct with
me,

This sums up our dear Miri Elka Bat Moshe Aharon v’Kunyah, Marilyn Stern, quite succinctly: a teacher, someone who was wonderfully precise and direct, and most of all, one abounding of an ever-preserved love for her family and her friends. May we learn from her example, and may she be bound up in the bond of life.

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It’s not Politics. It’s Morality. And Life.

Eulogy for Marilyn Stern

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