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After the Shooting - Kol Nidre 5780

10/10/2019

The call came from the Federation. I had six hours to prepare. It wasn’t enough. It was too much.

Rabbi Perelman, the rabbi for New Light, had performed three funerals followed by three shivas, and then another night of shivas, and another. He could do no more. He needed the night off. Would I step in? Said the rabbi at the Federation. Of course, I said. How could I not? Because what else could I do? I can’t do much, but I can offer words, and I can give hugs, and I can be present.

And so it was that I found myself at the shiva house of one of the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life building, called upon to lead Mincha Maariv and offer some words to frame things. I think the most natural question to ask might be ‘rabbi, what did you say?’ And I have to be honest, I have no idea what I said. I don’t remember it at all. I just know that it hurt like hell to be there.

It’s a terrible thing to die. It’s a terrible thing to die suddenly, before your time. But it is quite another thing to die, in fear, as a Jew, doing something Jewish and spiritual, something that you love, like going to shul. A shabbat at synagogue is supposed to be an island of respite at the end of a long week - a palace in space and time as Abraham Joshua Heschel would call it. Beyond the troubles of this world, and above it. But the troubles of this world invaded that palace and brought evil into that place of good. And in doing so, it brought that evil into the whole of the Jewish world. It was a shock.

It’s not that the evil of gun violence wasn’t already a prevalent and pervasive problem in America, and one that our society has failed to address in any meaningful way. The list of various mass-shooting locations in the past 10 years is varied and chaotic - college campuses and places of business; churches, mosques and synagogues; a country music concert in Las Vegas; a gay nightclub in orlando; a high school in Florida, and an elementary school in Connecticut. And so, on another level, it was not a shock. It was inevitable.

There are most certainly reasons for it. There is a coarsening of dialogue in America. There is hatred and division in the hearts of some. There are people with mental health problems and inadequate supervision and easy access to guns. There are people on the internet and in positions of leadership vilifying Jews, and blacks, and gays, and immigrants, and women. And there are guns, and guns, and guns, and so many guns in this country. Our country of 330 million people has 393 million guns. The country with the next largest amount of guns per capita is Yemen. Yemen, who have effectively been in a never-ending civil war since 1992. They have *half* as many guns as we do. And so we have guns, and we have no limits on our guns, and so people kill each other with guns. And we have free speech, and we have nearly no limit on free speech, and people speak hate, and then they take guns and they kill out of hate.

Clearly there is a problem, and clearly our society needs to do something about it. But this dvar torah is not meant to serve as a call to action or a solution to the epidemics of antisemitism and gun violence in our society. Honestly, the solutions are too obvious to be worthy of an extended talk - hate speech cannot be tolerated, and guns should only be the privilege of responsible Americans, and not a right freely granted to all, including lunatics and terrorists.

I’m focusing my thoughts today not on activism or solutions, which are really the responsibilities of somebody else, but rather on the harder thing - of just living in the scary world of today as a Jew.

Because we cannot wave a magic wand and make the world suddenly safe and peaceful. We must, instead, try and find peace in the world as it exists right now. We must come to peace with the universe rather than pretend that it will suddenly reshape itself.

A quick caveat - do not misunderstand me. Just because I want to devote time today to thinking about finding understanding in our chaotic and sometimes scary world does not mean I am fatalistic or reconciled to our fate. You that know me know that I am constantly committed to pressing for change, and that I will speak or protest or vote or write in order to create a better reality than the one we know of now.

But some things are larger than ourselves. Somethings are out of our control. We are not Gods, we are human. And so we must find understanding at times in a world that is chaotic and scary. We must move through the world in such a way that we can be wary of its dangers without internalizing the anxieties they create and subsequently becoming paralyzed with fear. We must also celebrate and revel in the wonders and the beauty of living without being blind to the suffering of the world.

Our tradition offers a path for both.

First, walking through a scary world without terror.

The story is told of the 6th Chabad Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak Shneerson, known as the Freideiker Rebbe. In Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, he began to be harassed by the secret police for teaching Torah in the atheistic USSR. Late one night, a pair of government thugs arrived at his house. Sitting across the table and threatening the rebbe to stop teaching Torah, one of the men pulled out a gun, and placed it on the table. The Friediker glanced at it, and without changing his expression, said ‘This kind of thing might scare a man with no God, and only one world. But I have one God, and two worlds; this world and the world to come. So I will continue to teach Torah.’ The men promptly got up and left.
Essentially the Freidiker rebbe’s response here is about two things integral to the spiritual life of a Jew - faith in God, and the notion of Divine justice.

What I mean by faith here is a sense that we are not ultimately the only thing in control of our fate - that God is in charge. We have free will and we can make many substantive decisions in our lives that can improve or degrade our outcomes - how hard we work, whether we plan or save for the future, who we choose to associate with, and the things we choose to say or don’t say. But a tremendous amount of life is beyond our control. You can say it’s up to fate, or the universe, or God. Ultimately, though, it is beyond our control. גדול אדונינו ורב כוח , לתבונתו אין מספר - Great is our God and mighty in power, God’s understanding has no limits. לה׳ הערץ ומלואה תבל ויושבי בה - The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains, it’s inhabitants and everything that dwells on it.

The nihilist or the atheist who has no faith and no God says: everything is random and nothing matters - I will trust only in me, and live only for myself. The faithful one and the theist who believes and trusts in God says: the world hums with the vibrancy of the creator, with the intent of the original artisan. I will live in faith and gratitude for every day I get, living with joy while integrating myself into God’s plan as best I can through Torah and Mitzvot.

Moreover, Judaism believes that faith is a two-way street - just as we place our love and faith in God, God places God’s love and faith in us. In the Talmud in Berachot, we are taught that just as humans put on tefillin in the morning to pray, since we humans were created in the image of God, God too much wear Tefillin. But wait! If God wear’s tefillin, what would be written in them? Human tefillin include the shma and vehavta in them, in which we proclaim ‘and you shall love the Lord your God’. According to the Talmud, God’s tefillin say “Who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation in the world?” As the Jews have faith in God, God has reciprocal faith in the Jews.

God’s faith and love for us extends to God’s care for our wellbeing. In the Talmud we are taught “ Rabbi Meir said , when a human being is in distress, what expression does the Shechinah, the Divine Presence use? "My head is in pain, My arm is in pain." According to this, when human beings suffer, God godself suffers. We may not be in control of our fate, but God is present with us when our fate causes us suffering.

The second integral aspect to the spiritual life of the Jew demonstrated by the Freideker rebbe is a sense of Divine justice. It is the notion that God is good, that God hates evil and that the wicked, and unjust will ultimately be punished. It is a notion that I will admit is sometimes hard to hold onto, particularly when a guy in a shiny new lifted Ford F-150 pickup goes charging and weaving through traffic, cutting off drivers, running red lights, and going 45 miles an hour in 25 mile an hour zone. I have faith in moments like that, that a cop has his ticket book out just around the next corner, and if not today, then maybe tomorrow or the next day.
I make light a little, but ultimately, that’s my theology - that good is ultimately rewarded by God and the universe, and that evil is ultimately punished. People who put out negativity and unkindness and thoughtlessness - or on a higher level of evil - commit sin and hurt people and kill people, will ultimately get their comeuppance, in this life or the next. This idea of righteous punishment is well-founded and prevalent in the Jewish tradition. You all know of the stories in Exodus and Numbers of Divine punishment. The 10 plagues of Egypt, and the punishment for the sin of the Golden Calf, and the ground opening up beneath the feet of Korach and his followers are to name but a few. The Torah in Deuteronomy has God telling us “Vengeance is Mine, and recompense too.”

But the Psalms are where the Torah really proclaims that evil will be met with vengeance. My personal favorite is Psalm 94, which includes some of the following lines in part:

God of retribution, LORD, God of retribution, appear!
Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their desserts!
How long shall the wicked, O LORD, how long shall the wicked exult,
They crush Your people, O LORD, they afflict Your very own;
they kill the widow and the stranger; they murder the fatherless,
The LORD knows the designs of men to be futile.
Happy is the man whom You discipline, O LORD, the man You instruct in Your teaching,
to give him tranquillity in times of misfortune, until a pit be dug for the wicked.
Judgment shall again accord with justice and all the upright shall rally to it.
But the LORD is my haven; my God is my sheltering rock.
He will make their evil recoil upon them, annihilate them through their own wickedness; the LORD our God will annihilate them.

There are a number of reasons I love this psalm. For one, it provides a degree of fantasy wish fulfillment for me. The psalm tells me that the person that commits acts of hate and violence and cruelty will get their just desserts in the form of obliteration at the hands of the Divine judge. This is also the theology of the Yamim Noraim, the days of awesomeness, in which we famously proclaim that God is quote “the ultimate arbiter of justice” in the piyyut ‘bayom din’. It is also the overarching theology of the entire high holiday season, in which we examine our past actions and repent our misdeeds in the concern that our actions may have been displeasing to God.

We who are of little deeds, says the machzor.
Who shall live, and who shall die, says the machzor.
But repentance prayer and generous charitable giving will avert an evil decree, says the machzor.
The theology of the High Holidays is that good is rewarded with life and evil punished with death. The Torah reiterates this theology of instant gratification when it appends a reward of long life for the performance of certain mitzvot like honoring father and mother, and shoeing away the mother bird from a nest before one collects the eyes.

Going back to the time of the Talmud, though, our rabbis knew that this system of reward and punishment - the kind of ‘lightning from heaven’ - evildoers to the pit - winning lottery tickets results for the pious - was unrealistic. Sometimes the righteous are taken too soon, and sometimes the wicked live long and comfortable lives. They added the caveat that the rewards for long life or shortened life might be applicable not in this world, but in the world to come.

Me? I’d like to think it’s a little of both. The life of a selfish and materialistic person with little regard for others is inevitably going to lonely and shallow, and it terms of quality, that life will seem relatively brief. Moreover, their memory will not live on long. They will not have legions of children named after them, nor will their stories be recounted for generations, except perhaps as an instructive tale of what not to do. The person who lives a trite and meaningless life, or worse, a cruel and evil life, is remembered by all in the light of day for exactly who they were, sometimes in this life, sometimes in the next. The God of retribution indeed appears, and Judgment really does accord with justice.

So while we cannot ensure that the world will suddenly become safe from dangerous people, or that the rising tide of racism and hatred and antisemitism in America will suddenly and aggressively reverse course, we can walk through the world in peace, knowing that we live each day striving to our best, to live honestly and with faith, and to be compassionate and thoughtful individuals whose memories will endure for generations as paragons of goodness. The wicked get a pit, and nothing more.

When it comes to trying to emotionally and theologically deal with the question of walking through a world that contains great evil, and trying to remain hopeful, I turn often to the Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piasetzna rebbe, also know as the Aish Kodesh or ‘Holy Fire’, the title of his most famous work. The Piasetzna lived in Poland from 1889 to 1943. He and his Chasidim were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939. While in the ghetto, he continued to teach Torah in secret at the end of every shabbat, and his words were scribbled onto scraps of whatever paper could be found, including envelopes and butchers paper and soiled garbage. Rabbi Shapira witnessed and endured great suffering, and it is documented in his divrei torah. When the Warsaw ghetto uprising broke out, the papers were collected in a metal bucket with a lid and buried in the ground, only to be dug up years later by accident during a construction project. The Piasetzna rebbe and his Chasidim were deported in the Spring or Summer of 1943 to the Trawniki work camp, and when the camp was liquidated in November, he and all his followers were shot to death.

There are many hassidic takes on the problem of evil, but there are not many Hassidic takes on the problem of evil that come from a person who experienced the worst evils and cruelties of the Nazis and the Holocaust. So when I learned this teaching from the Piasetzna rebbe, it truly took my breath away. The Piasetzna, commenting more broadly on a verse in Exodus regarding following God’s commandments and statutes, said this:

Of all the earth is the voice of the Torah heard, from the chirping of the birds and from the mooing of cows, and from the voices and noises of humans, from all are heard the voice of God that is in Torah. At the receiving of Torah, it is said - קול גדול ולא וסף - "with a great voice, and God added no more." (Devarim 5:19), and Rashi explains it as 'without cease', that this voice is ever-constant and all can hear it. It fills all evil and elevates it to good. All the evil things and fowl speeches that the haters of Israel speak about Israel are inverted to the voice of Torah. Since they too are part of the world God created, their lives are from the voice of God in Torah that have branched into evil speech. It is simply that their words are of the rebuke from Torah made corporeal into this hate of Israel, or this one speaks to strike or afflict Israel, God forbid. As all is a part of the unity of Torah, they all rise to the voice of Torah, and all evil will be erased.

Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman’s understanding of evil is that it is temporary, and part of an imperfect, non-Torah world, that has yet to come to the truth and unity of God and Torah. That evil will ultimately be absorbed like water to a sponge or like paper in a flame by the all-encompassing power of Torah, which is synonymous with good and with the Divine. The Piasetzna rebbe transcended evil by regarding it as a blip in comparison to good, a hiccup that was beneath him. The Nazis to him were simply part of the anti-Divine, but in the future, he was certain that their ultimate designs would be for naught, and that Torah would fill the whole world with the unity of justice and light.

This is a man who walked through the world without fear or anger or hatred - a spiritually elevated being who understood the justice that corrects evil not as a fire-and-brimstone-from-heaven pipedream, but as the natural order of a universe that is dictated by Torah, that emanates from Torah, that is infused at the molecular level with Torah.

To conclude, I learned a surprising thing a few weeks ago in Talmud study. There is a phrase we say in prayer three times a day, everyday, at the conclusion of the Amidah prayer, and another dozen times a day at the end of the kaddish - a thing we say so frequently we might very well forget the meaning of what we are saying - Oseh shalom bimromav who yaaseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisrael v’imru amen. May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life, upon us and upon all Israel; and say, Amen.
I had never known where this line had come from before - I had assumed it was composed in the period before the talmudic rabbis by the authors of many of our central prayers, a group on men known as the Anshei HaKnesset Hagedolah, who maybe lived in the 2nd or 1st century BCE. But then I came across the likely origin of this text, a line from the book of Job, chapter 25:
הַמְשֵׁל וָפַחַד עִמּוֹ עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו׃
Dominion and dread are God’s; God imposes peace in the heavens.

The original text from Job, a book about Divine punishment and judgment, imagines a world that God rules that is perilous, and intense, and fearful - dominion and dread are God’s - and those tools are the manner by which God rules the universe - God imposes peace in a tyrannical, iron-fisted manner, with authority and fear.

The composers of the Oseh Shalom prayer, though, flipped the script so to speak - they inverted the text, and subverted it too. They edited out the fear and dread, and made the prayer aspirational - may the one who makes peace in the heavens bring peace on us. They took the part where we walk through a world of fear, and turned it into a hope for a world of goodness, a world of peace, a world of justice, a world of God, a world of Torah. The way forward in a scary world is faith and justice - to fight like hell for justice to make the world a better place, but also to walk through the world in peace and faith. To do so honors the memory of those who died trying to life their lives as Jews, and is the true embodiment of what it means to believe with abiding faith in Torah, the tree of life.

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Hagar the Stranger - RH Day 2 5780

10/2/2019

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A few years ago my step-mother, who at the time was the West Coast editor for Mademoiselle, attended an after party for the Oscars. In the sparse early-arriving crowd she spied Charlize Theron across the room, and smiled, remembering that she had interviewed her for a story a few months earlier. But seeing as Charlize Threon is an international movie star and my step-mom is a relative nobody, she thought nothing of it and continued to hang towards the buffet table.

After a few minutes, my step-mother Jamie felt a tap on her shoulder. She spun around, and there stood Charlize Theron. “Jamie Diamond, right?” she said. “I don’t mean to bother you. You interviewed me a few months ago, remember? Well, I was wondering if you could do me a favor. You see, I don’t really know anybody here, and I was hoping I could hang out with you for a little while. Is that alright?”

We have all, even world-famous Hollywood actors, been in situations where we have felt alone.

Many of us have likely been in situations where we have felt vulnerable and cast out. That makes us all capable of identifying, at least to some degree, with one of the characters of the story in Genesis that we read at Rosh Hashanah on the first day, Hagar.

Our annual reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah is the story of Sarah’s sending out of Hagar in Genesis 21; or to be more precise, Sarah demanding Abraham cast out Hagar. Hagar and her son Ishmael flee to the wilderness, where she collapses in hopelessness and despair. But God, through an angel opens her eyes to a well, and there’s a mini-coda to the story that Ishmael grows up to be a great huntsman and that his mother gets him a wife from Egypt.

This text has a few classic interpretations and drashes that you probably have heard at some point in a Rosh Hashanah of the past. There’s the take that God opened Hagar’s eyes to something present in the world rather than actually creating a well from thin air, teaching us that we need to take notice of all the wonderful miracles that are already present in our lives. There’s the message of faith: since Abraham is unsure of the right thing to do, God reassures him that Hagar will be just fine. Hagar doesn’t believe either, but in the end it all works out and Hagar is fine, teaches us that we ought to have faith in God that in the end it will all work out. There’s also a reverse take, or an in-depth take if you will, where, rather than accept the takes of the traditional commentators like Rashi that Sarah and Abraham and God are all doing the right thing in casting out Hagar, we should read the text with unbiased eyes and just tell it like it is - Sarah is selfish and cruel; Abraham is spineless; and God is mysterious in this story of a woman done wrong. This type of teaching tells us that rather than read the text as our instruction of what *to* do, we should instead read it as potentially what *not* to do. And that can work too.

I’m not doing any of that this year. I want to start with a broader problem, which is the problem of the existence of a thin and unsubstantial personage in the Torah like Hagar. She’s treated in the text as a minor character, a slave woman with little agency, a bit player in the text. When Jews look at this story each year, we invariably identify with Abraham and Sarah and God and Isaac, and explore those people and those plotlines extensively.

At least in my lifetime, I have never spent more than a cursory effort at understanding the story from the perspective of Hagar. But just as Tom Stoppard explored two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his 1966 play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’, we will take the person of Hagar and magnify her using Midrash, the rabbinic imagination of the 2nd to 4th century, as well as my own thoughts and imagination, to figure out the true motives and meaning of a seemingly uncomplex woman. So strap in for the ride, folks, because that’s what we’re going to do. And, of course, in doing so, her narrative will have aspects which will resonate deeply with the moral state of America today.

The first place to start is her name. Hagar, very simply, means ‘dweller’, ‘sojourner’, or ‘stranger’. In biblical context it often appears in texts alongside two other protected classes of people in endangered situations - the yatom or ‘orphan’, and the almanah or ‘widow’. Strangers, orphans and widows get special laws in the Torah on multiple occasions that protect them from abuse or mistreatment, since they are regarded as in a precarious state with no one to provide for them. Later in the Bible, the term ‘Ger’ is used for someone that either lives with Jews but is not Jewish, or converts to Judaism. That last connotation really doesn’t take hold until much later. The Jewish tradition understands Hagar as a servant and a non-Jew, and also because the root meaning of her name, as someone transient - a foreigner.

We are introduced to Hagar in Genesis 16. The Torah tells us in verse 1:

Genesis 16:1
וְשָׂרַי֙ אֵ֣שֶׁת אַבְרָ֔ם לֹ֥א יָלְדָ֖ה ל֑וֹ וְלָ֛הּ שִׁפְחָ֥ה מִצְרִ֖ית וּשְׁמָ֥הּ הָגָֽר׃
Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar.

To conclude that thought about Hagar as a foreigner - take a moment and think - How did an Egyptian woman end up in Canaan as the servant to a couple that originally come from Ur in Babylonia - or modern day Iraq? Hagar is a foreigner, the servant to foreigners. Her situation is exceedingly precarious - a foreigner who entrusts her life and livelihood to other foreigners, not unlike a migrant passing through a neutral country. But more on that later.

Even in the verse in which she first appears, Hagar’s very existence is set up the explanation for another plot problem - and that is, Sarah’s infertility. We know where this is headed - Hagar will serve as the surrogate for Abraham’s offspring. In her first appearance in the story, Hagar is not a person of her own - she’s barely a Downton Abbey-level downstairs maid. Instead, we’ve gone full-on Margaret Atwood ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, as Hagar’s role to bear a child for somebody else. At least at the outset, she is barely a person. Instead, she is regarded as almost an object, a womb, and nothing more. None of our commentators - not the ancient ones like Rashi or Ramban or the modern ones Aviva Zornberg or Nechama Leibowitz stop to consider her at all. She is bit player or even a prop in the larger and more important narrative of the story of Sarah’s barrenness. The story continues:

And Sarai said to Abram, “Look, the LORD has kept me from bearing. Consort with my maid; perhaps I shall have a son through her.” And Abram heeded Sarai’s request.
So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took her maid, Hagar the Egyptian—after Abram had dwelt in the land of Canaan ten years—and gave her to her husband Abram as concubine.
He cohabited with Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was lowered in her esteem.
Abram said to Sarai, “Your maid is in your hands. Deal with her as you think right.” Then Sarai treated her harshly, and she ran away from her.

So Hagar is abused, either physically or verbally, and runs away in Genesis 16. In Genesis 21, our Torah reading from yesterday, we get almost the same story, except this time, instead of Hagar fleeing, Sarah explicitly casts her out, saying to Abraham
גרש האמה הזות ואת בנה
‘Cast out that slave woman and her son.’ I find it very notable that she refuses to use Hagar’s name or Ishmael’s name here. Again, Hagar is made into an object. She is depersonalized and made into a capital O ‘Other’, so that we can ignore her pain and suffering; so that we can say this is other people. This is not ‘my problem’.
This is what Alex Haley describes in Roots when he writes of Kunta Kinte being brutally whipped and told by his slavers ‘Your name is Toby.’
You grant a person their essential humanity by using their name. Conversely, you objectify a person by ignoring their name, and take away their power and their human significance by calling them ‘servant’ or ‘boy’ or ‘that one’ or ‘it’. Sarah has done something dehumanizing here, and the text acknowledges it.

Abraham is disturbed and turns to God, and God says - don’t worry, do what Sarah says’. Abraham packs them some bread and water - God finds them a well. But ultimately, Hagar and Ishmael are left to fend for themselves. I’ll return to this a little bit later, but Hagar and Ishmael call to mind every person in our society that is mistreated and left to fend for themselves on the margins - the poor, the elderly, the hungry, the homeless, victims of domestic violence, and the immigrant. Hold that thought.
This concept of the ‘Other’ and our relationship to them is a philosophical one that originates with Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. Put simply everyone outside of ourselves is ‘Other’, and how we relate to them is an expression of how much or little God is present in our lives. All people are ‘other’, but sometimes, when we marginalize one person or an entire group of vulnerable people, like minorities or women, we elevate the concept of otherness to a whole ‘nother level.

The story of Hagar isn’t the only story of a woman on the precarious fringes. In the book of Ruth, Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law, loses her husband and her sons. Naomi tells Ruth to return to her people - giving her the option to be cast out. But Ruth refuses to leave, saying famously “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
Perhaps these two stories are instructive contrasts about being forceful about advocating for your own rights as a woman. Hagar is mistreated by Sarah and cast out, but makes no move at being more integrated into the Jewish people by trying to find her place in Abraham and Sarah’s family the way Ruth does with Naomi. Ruth wants to become a Jew, and wants to be faithful to Naomi. Hagar wants neither of these things. But also, Sarah doesn’t seem to be open to bringing Hagar and Ishmael into the family. To that degree, this story becomes not about self-advocacy, but instead about being inviting to others when we are in a position of power. We can either be like Naomi - creating connection and allowing another person freedom, and then supporting them on their own journey. Or we can be like Sarah - judging and shunning, pushing away, saying ‘it’s not my problem.’
Another way to frame this story is also about inside-out and outside-in. Ruth is on the outside, but ultimately comes in to the Jewish people; Hagar is on the inside of the first Jewish family, but ends up leaving or being pushed out.
For the High Holidays, this is a great point for personal introspection. Who do we push away, and who do we bring close? Do we cultivate relationships with people that are like us or different from us? Do we make snap judgments about people that ultimately demonstrate us to be unwelcoming, or are we open-minded and willing to stand with open arms?
This thought gives us a chance to think of another odd contrast that the text of Hagar brings up for us, and that is the weird reversal of the character that Abraham plays in this story. Here, Abraham takes a backseat to the wishes of his wife - and ejects the foreigner Hagar from his house. But in Genesis 18, Abraham is famous for welcoming in three (male) strangers, while he is recovering from his own circumcision. There we learn that Abraham keeps his tent open on all four sides in order that he can see nomads from all sides and welcome them into his tent. Abraham is welcoming in one story, unwelcoming in another. Hospitable and inhospitable. We call to mind two mitzvot from the story of Abraham and the tent - the first is the mitzvah of Hachnasat orchim, welcoming guests - and the second is the mitzvah of the sukkah, an open place to bring acquaintances. The story of Hagar, by comparison, is not one our tradition utilizes to instruct our behavior. As we enter 5780, we can ask ourselves once more - which Abraham are we? The one that pushes away, or the one that brings close?

That’s in regards to personal responsibility. There is also the question of collective responsibility - which is to say, to what degree do we have societal responsibilities to people on the margins? Abraham and Sarah’s disregard for Hagar creates a very self-oriented paradigm of human responsibility - everybody is out for themselves - it’s not my problem. Had the Torah just given us this story without others in contrast, we might learn the importance of self-reliance and the ‘up-by-your-bootstraps’ mentality. America is big on concepts of the self-made man, the Horatio Alger I did it by myself narrative. Judaism is not, though.

13 times in the Tanakh we are told to care for and not oppress the stranger, the widow, and the orphan - of which Hagar and Ishmael suit all three categories. 422 times in the Torah we see mention of the stranger. The most straightforward and all encompassing line might be in Deuteronomy 10, when we learn:
“For the LORD your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe,
but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing.--
וַאֲהַבְתֶּם אֶת־הַגֵּר כִּי־גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם׃
You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Torah tells us that last bit - to care for strangers, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt - either 21 times or 36 times, depending on who you ask.
The Torah wants us to create a society of mutual responsibility in which we endeavor to be more responsible for each other, not less; that we ought to care more about each other, not less. We do not stand idly by; we are not bystanders, we are upstanders.
To that point, the Torah itself essentially evolves from these early chapters in Genesis, which are full of imperfect people like our patriarchs and matriarchs and their family squabbles like Laban cheating Jacob or Joseph being thrown in a pit by his brothers. By the fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, the Torah is beginning not only to expect a deeper level of human compassion, but even codifies it into law in a strange ritual called the Eglah Arufah - breaking the neck of a calf:
In Deuteronomy 21, we get this text which is the polar opposite of the dual stories Hagar’s expulsions. There we find the Torah says this:
“If, in the land that the LORD your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known,
your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns.
The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then take a heifer which has never been worked, which has never pulled in a yoke;
and the elders of that town shall bring the heifer down to an everflowing wadi, which is not tilled or sown. There, in the wadi, they shall break the heifer’s neck.”
The Torah continues and explains that the Levites should come and pronounce a declaration absolving the people of the bloodguilt for this person.
What’s happening here is this: the Torah is essentially saying that a stranger that is killed near to a town is a societal failure of the town itself for failing to police, protect, and escort the victim. A valuable animal must be sacrificed as a form of punitive compensation for failure to care for a vulnerable stranger. Moreover, the Talmud in Tractate Sotah adds that there is an obligation for the townspeople to provide levaya - accompaniment - to travellers to and from towns on dangerous roads. They must also provide the traveller food, lest a poor traveller become a robber themselves to survive.
Rabbi Dr. Aryeh Cohen, in his book Justice in the City, adds this note to this story of the Eglah Arufah: “If people can fall into a place which is beyond anybody’s responsibility, this is a reflection on the justness of a city (or a society) itself. In our daily lives, the practice of reaching out beyond ourselves is also a performance of accompaniment. In the life of a city, the response to the stranger has to be the center of the discussion.” To a later Torah understanding, Sarah and Abraham were wrong to cast out Hagar. Yes, Hagar would ultimately turn out to be fine, but if she hadn’t the bloodguilt would be upon them.
There are lots of capital O Others in society today, as we have mentioned. The elderly, the poor, the homeless, the hungry, and the mentally ill are all marginalized and left insufficiently protected by the rest of society.

But nobody is more literally a sojourning stranger like Hagar in our society today than undocumented immigrants. Our country has approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants here in the US. Some have been here more than 30 years. The overwhelming majority have been productive members of society, filling roles large and small in our economy, often for low wages, and often in jobs that other Americans refuse to do. In order to get those jobs, they very often furnish their employer with a fake Social Security number - a number that means that the US government will take out taxes each month from their paychecks, but our undocumented workers will never be able to collect any social security. In other words, most work hard, and most pay lots of taxes. You probably know already know this, but in addition, immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding residents in the US, and commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans. According to a 2015 study by the Cato Institution, "The criminal conviction and arrest rates for immigrants is well below those of native-born Americans," The rate per 100,000 residents was 899 for undocumented immigrants, 611 for legal immigrants and 1,797 for native-born Americans.

And yet many people in our country speak ill of them and denigrates them publicly. They scapegoat them for the problems of our society ranging from crime to low education rates to trying to import a foreign culture to the US. Our country has offered no legal path to citizenship for these 11 million. Even more, our country, rather than open a tent door or find a way to provide asylum for poor people fleeing conflict or violence or poverty plans nothing more than to build higher walls and more dangerous crossings into the US. The modern-day Hagars and Ishmaels are drowning in the Rio Grande, or being held in indefinite detention waiting for an asylum hearing, while our society collectively replies ‘Cast out that slave woman and her son.’ They are Other, capital O.
Which is why the Torah has these laws about escorting the wayfarer in Deuteronomy. And that is why the Torah has these laws about remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Hagar was once other. We were once other. The totality of Judaism, one of it’s most central principles, is not to make everyone else feel ‘Other’. We instead must engage the humanity within them - to see everyone as a whole person, to love them and to uplift them.

In a year marked with much antisemitism and violence against Jews, it is easy to be hyperaware of ourselves being regarded by bigots and racists as ‘the other’ while simultaneously forgetting that folks, like undocumented immigrants, are experiencing dangerous and acute Otherness themselves. When we are threatened, it is easy to turn our concerns inward. This is the wrong response. We must watch out for ourselves while striving to protect other threatened groups as well. To quote psalm 89, we must build a world of lovingkindness. The message of the Hagar story - the story of a person treated as a foreigner - must ultimately be to discard and cast out the very notion of foreignness and otherness completely.

We must commit ourselves to the protection of all our fellow humans, especially the vulnerable, especially the stranger, especially the immigrant. We each can do that in how we vote, in how we give tzedakah, and how we speak to others about immigrants, and how we allow others to speak about immigrants. Remember to put money aside for organizations like RAICES and HIAS that do legal advocacy. And if a person denegrates the stranger in from of you, find a respectful and kind way to ask them where their ancestors come from. Because all of us, at some point, came from somehwhere else - and we all hope to be received in new places with eyes of Naomi’s eyes of compassion, and not Sarah’s eyes of contempt.

We must inculcate in ourselves a radical notion of compassion for the stranger. It is my prayer for 5780, that we live out the words of Dr Martin Luther King, who said “The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" Rather we should say "If I do not stop to help my fellow man, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

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Impeachment 5780

10/2/2019

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With regards to the Jews and the government, perhaps there is no more classic and profound line than Tevye’s statement in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when he prays “may the lord bless and keep the czar … far away from us.”

What a crazy week, in a crazy month, in a crazy year it has been in America. Sometimes, in the history of America, our nation and our lives have been filled with uncertainty and tumult: from the days after 9/11 to the scary times of the Cold War, and through the years of war in southeast asia or the Great Depression. America has had dark periods and chaotic periods, but generally, we looked to the White House and got reassurance that everything was going to work out ok.

Looking back to the past Jewish year 5779, America was prosperous, and stable. We are not at war, the economy is good, crime is generally down and despite our many issues regarding race and gender and sexual identity, I for one feel confident that we as a country are at least on the right track in those regards. We Americans are apparently so in need of adventure and excitement that, despite the relative tranquility in our country, we just had to put a wildly unpredictable former TV reality show star in the White House - I guess to spice things up, maybe?

This year, I had zero intention of talking about Donald Trump at High Holidays, for a variety of relatively obvious reasons. But after the congress announced its intention to begin impeachment proceedings last week, it became impossible not to discuss - to ignore it would be to pretend like there wasn’t a president-shaped elephant in the middle of the room.

We as American Jews have always been unique in the history of the world’s Jews. Unlike the Jews of Europe, American Jews have always been an integral part of America from its very beginnings. In Europe, Jews were quote “emancipated” in the mid 19th century, and granted citizenship, but they still began there with 800 years of being second-class serfs, at best. In this country, American Jews were woven into the fabric of America with relative equality from its very beginnings. It has always meant that, unlike Tevye, we have never prayed for the government to be ‘far away from us’. Instead, we have sought its nearness. From George Washington’s letter to the congregation at Newport RI which I spoke on last year, to Abraham Lincoln reversing General Grant’s order of expulsion from Tennessee in the Civil War, and to Louis Brandeis and Eric Cantor and Paul Wellstone and Arlen Spector and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, American Jews have always been close, not far, from the government.

It is why we pray for the welfare of the government, which is the topic and text upon which I will frame our current American predicament as we enter the year 5780 with impeachment as a likely constant background hum to our daily lives.

Why do we pray for the government? Where does this interesting custom originate from?

I was surprised to find that the custom of praying for the government is quite ancient. The Jewish thinker Philo, who lived in Alexandria and Rome, records that there was a prayer in his time, the 1st century CE, for the Roman emperor. Jews in Babylonia and Persia and Medieval Europe continued that custom by praying for the king, and when the concept of democracy took hold, it was the eminent scholar Louis Ginzburg who reformulated a prayer tailor specifically to American democracy in the 1920s.
All of those prayers were centered on one specific biblical verse from our first prophet to lead during the diaspora, when the first temple was destroyed and the Jews were carried off to Babylon. It was the prophet Jeremiah who wrote:

וְדִרְשׁוּ אֶת־שְׁלוֹם הָעִיר אֲשֶׁר הִגְלֵיתִי אֶתְכֶם שָׁמָּה וְהִתְפַּלְלוּ בַעֲדָהּ אֶל־יְהוָה כִּי בִשְׁלוֹמָהּ יִהְיֶה לָכֶם שָׁלוֹם׃

“And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the LORD in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.”
Since that time, our prayer for the government has evolved and become more aspirational, reflecting both the realities of democracy that allow our greater participation, and our own religious moral proclivities which we hope to inject into the American dialogue.
Our own prayer for our country is recited every week at Shabbat services. You’ll find it, if you’re not familiar with it, on page 148 of the blue sim shalom siddurim.
You will recall certain lines from the prayer for our government, like “we ask for your blessings on our country - teach them insights from your Torah that they may administer affairs of state fairly” and that they “exercise just and rightful authority”. And the prayers asks - “may citizens of all races and creeds forge a common bond in true harmony to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions that are the pride and glory of our country.”

“Safeguard” - “the ideals and free institutions.” Man oh man.

The principal defenses against tyranny are transparency, and checks and balances. In fact, to a great degree, the Torah was created as one of the earliest documents known to man that legislated limits of power on the king in hopes of serving as a check. In the ancient world, where a corrupt and unjust king or queen could come to power, oppress the people, favor the wealthy, and build himself palaces while his subjects starved, the Torah interjects a dose of law into the rule of the king. In fact, Torah is specifically concerned with a king who abuses power in order to forward his own personal position. In Deuteronomy 17:16 and 17 we learn “Moreover, a king shall not keep many horses … And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess.” Our Torah is concerned here particularly that a Jewish king will abuse his seat of power by enriching himself at the expense of others. The central idea here is that leadership is a sacred trust, and must not be abused to the advantage of the leader him or herself.

In our democracy, those Torah values have been formalized into the US Federal law itself in many different ways that seek to protect politicians from using bribery to line their pockets or to prevent them from calling on foreign governments to help them get re-elected.

The expectation of democracy is that we are involved and engaged in maintaining and safeguarding those ideals and free institutions ourselves, at the very least, by electing people who are honest and just, and will hold their fellow politicians to the same standard of being honest and just.

Personally, this prayer, the prayer for our country, has been very hard for me the past few years. I fully recognize that prayer is often meant to be aspirational - a hope of what might occur in the future with a little providence or hard work. But never have I felt that the aspiration and the truth were so so far apart as in this prayer and our current government. It feels like a so-called bracha levatela - a null and void blessing - to say each week that we hope that the president will be taught insights from the Torah, when he himself proudly boasts that he does not read books. It is depressing to pray that for us to pray that he administer affairs of state fairly when he and his team have worked with multiple foreign governments in search of aid to damage the credibility of opposing candidates. Leaving aside his politics and his policy, on the face, it seems that he is engaged in the same style of dirty tricks that you will recall Richard Nixon using in 1972 when he used a team of bungling burglars to steal secrets from his Democratic opponents. Regardless of how Americans feel about tax policy or our Middle East policy or welfare of health care, all Americans should agree without any shadow of a doubt that an election should be a level playing field, free of graft and manipulation and outside influence.

You may be interested to know that the Conservative movement has actually replaced the prayer that we here at Brith Sholom say with an updated version. The Sim Shalom version we use was originally published in 1972.

Instead of ‘teach them insights from your Torah’; the new version from 2016 says ‘Pour out your blessing upon this land, upon its inhabitants, upons its leaders, its judges, officers and officials who faithfully devote themselves to the needs of the public,’ all of which I would frame as a slight but inconsequential change from the previous version.

It goes on to say ‘Help them understand the rules of justice You have decreed so that peace and security, happiness and freedom will never depart from our land’.

This section has one notable change from the old version of the prayer, which was ‘so that they may administer affairs of state fairly that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide in our midst.’

Did you catch the difference? The prayer is shortened from six ideals to four; Prosperity has been dropped, as has justice. Justice has been coupled to the line about the Divine rules of justice, implying that the reason is mostly about repetitiveness - Torah is the book of justice, we’ve already mentioned that we hope our leaders will be influenced by it, so it has become superfluous. But the dropping of prosperity - that is interesting. One could intuit that the composer of this prayer may have recognized that the go-go attitudes of the 1980s, with the ‘greed is good’ ethos of Gordon Gecko, coupled with the Sub-prime mortgage debacle of 2008 meant that perhaps praying for national prosperity was an emphasis of the wrong values.

Another interesting change is to the middle paragraph. In our Sim Shalom it reads:

while the new text reads:

The focus on races, groups, institutions, and leaders has been eliminated. Hatred and Bigotry as concepts are gone. In their place, the new prayer focuses on the ideas in every person’s heart that allow them to cleave to one another. America in this prayer’s amendation is being reframed - away from being a country of many tribes seeking coexistant, and towards being a land of peoples trying to grow and thrive together. Whereas the America of the 1960s led to a prayer that focused on our racial faultlines, the America of the 2000s and 2010s led to a prayer about individuals taking personal responsibility, a move perhaps to make the prayer meaningful for every person. For while I, Mark Goodman, am not a bigot, and I cannot personally safeguard the free institutions, I can work to uproot hatred from my heart and plant love where it might have been.

The last line of that paragraph is also the Conservative movements great aspiration for us moving forward - to root out poverty from our land. We have too long accepted as a human society that some people will have and some people will lack - some will be homeless, some will go hungry. Ending poverty is an idea that has been around for a long, long time. But economic inequality is bad in America, and getting worse. A report from NBC this week described that income inequality grew again from 2017 to 2018, and that inequality in the US is at its highest levels in 50 years. A 2014 study of wealth inequality found that the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households own virtually the same share of all the nation's wealth. Our religion believes that a decent standard of living should be achievable for everybody, and it believes that it is a responsibility of every American to uplift and support their fellow man, and our movement believes this is worth emphasizing at least once in prayer, in English, each and every Shabbat, until such time as poverty is no longer our countries greatest failing and its greatest challenge.

Both prayers, though, conclude with the same essential message - a hope that we will find a day when war will never be needed again. We will continue to ask that someday we reach the day when we can beat swords into plowshares and fulfill isaiah’s prophecy - lo yisa goy el goy cherev v’loyilmidu od milchamah - nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor will they again learn war anymore.

To return to the very idea I began with, this most contemporary prayer for our country does not as to keep the government far away from me, but rather brings it closer to the individual than ever before. You are the government. I am the government. We are the people. We expect transparency and honesty and kindness and compassion. We expect the same thing from our fellow citizens as we do from our family and friends, and our fellow congregants. We endeavor to follow the words of Zechariah who said :
“Speak every person the truth to their neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates.”
And to follow the words of Micah when he said : “Only to do justice And to love goodness, And to walk modestly with your God.”
We expect nothing less from our country, its government, for its leaders and advisors. And just as entrust them to make and execute the laws, we expect them to abide by them or suffer the consequences, just like any other citizen, great or small, rich or poor. And we as Jews, as Americans, and as citizens will not stand idly by or turn a blind eye if they do not.

I conclude with the words of Dr Abraham Joshua Heschel who wrote the following:

That guidance was given to the Jewish people in the form of the Torah. I hope that we all go forward into 5780 living our values as Jews, by acting them out as Americans. Shanah Tovah.

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After the Shooting - Kol Nidre 5780

Hagar the Stranger - RH Day 2 5780

Impeachment 5780

Divrei Torah

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