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Conversion will help to secure the Jewish Future - BaMidbar 5785

6/6/2025

Dvar Torah BaMidbar 5785

When I was trained to be a rabbi in beginning in 2001 at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, in our second year lifecycles class, we were trained in the basics of converting people to Judaism. The majority of folks converting at that time were converting for marriage to a Jewish partner. The couples took the class together, and a few singles took it out of a purely religious and spiritual interest in joining the faith of Abraham and Sarah. But I want you to hold this thought about the makeup and popularity of classes for conversion to judaism. Put a pin in it. We will come back to it.

At that time, in 2001, the Jewish community was still all in a tizzy about the 1990 Jewish population survey which revealed high levels of intermarriage - around 40%. Affiliation rates to American synagogues were in decline. And overall, there was a deep and abiding concern about the demographic future of the Jewish community - about whether the American Jewish community, due to falling affiliation, falling birthrates, rising intermarriage, and general apathy, were slowly going to decline to oblivion. In his talks at youth conventions and hebrew school teacher symposia in this era, a beloved rabbi and teacher of mine used to take any available opportunities to cajole the assembled young people with these words on falling birth rates: he would say “your doing Hitler’s work for them.” He was eventually convinced this was not a compelling way to reach the young people to compel them to marry young and have lots of kids.

Nonetheless, 24 years later, the same anxieties exist in the Jewish community today about our numbers, our size, and our lack of domestic growth. It is a concern, or at least a worthwhile question, that our people have had for more than 3000 years.

Parshat bamidbar famously begins with a census, saying
שְׂאוּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ כׇּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם בְּמִסְפַּר שֵׁמוֹת כׇּל־זָכָר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם׃
“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.”

In short, the Torah tells us: count up the numbers. And list the names.

Now, this is not the only census the Israelites have been asked to do. There’s a census in Exodus 30, and another in Numbers 26, and one for the priests in Numbers 4. And different commentators either think these are different censuses - one for all people, another for military aged males - or that they are repeated versions of the same census.
The question then, and now, is this: how many of us are there? Are we growing, or shrinking, as a people? And perhaps, most importantly, what does that say about us? The fundamental anxiety revealed in the census, either the one in the desert 3000 years ago or the last Pew Survey of American Jews in 2020, is whether our children and our grandchildren will be Jewish; whether we as a people will shrink and shrivel away in this country to nothing. I think the answer is no. I think there are two reasons for this, which are actually intertwined.

First, the problem with a quantitative measure of Judaism is that it isn’t a qualitative measure of Judaism. By that I mean a survey that asks someone if they are Jewish doesn’t really tell you much about why they are Jewish, or how being Jewish is important to them. A person could tell the Pew survey, yes, I am Jewish. And the follow up question of ‘why’ might result in them saying ‘well my parents are Jewish. But I’ve never been to Hebrew school, I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover, and I don’t know anything about our religion or traditions.’ And its not that this person is doing anything wrong - they’re simply living their life. Their approach to Judaism is based on our historic tribal ethnic Jewishness. It is the conversation that folks had with my generation of Jews about what was important going forward. We were told that should meet a nice Jewish girl and get married and have Jewish children. And if we stopped to asked why, the answer was a fairly straightforward ‘so your children will be Jews.’ Quantity. But the question of what our Judaism consisted of was secondary.
Let me say it another way. For years I got to sit on a three rabbi panel with confirmation kids at Temple Emanuel in Denver. And the kids had to prepare questions and ask all three rabbis. And pretty much every year one card would be pulled and the question would be posed to me: why should I be Jewish? And other rabbis gave answers about tradition or family or community or God or chosenness, and they were good answers. My answer was this: be Jewish, don’t be Jewish, it doesn’t matter to me. But I think the Torah holds the secrets to how to live a meaningful life. And because studying Torah and commentaries is literally all I do all day, every day, aside from calling page numbers sometimes on Saturday mornings, I have the secret to living a meaningful life. If you want it, I will share it with anyone that is interested. If you aren’t interested, that’s totally ok too. It’s your life, you get to live it how you like.

Now that is a qualitative answer, and based on an approach to Judaism that regards it much more as a spiritual practice than a religion. It is, for some, a slightly heretical answer. In my day, being Jewish and carrying forward the tradition was expected, and the way to compel that expectation was often guilt, or expectation. ‘I did it, so you will do it.’ My answer of ‘it’s up to you, it’s your life’ - some people don’t like it because I’m not strident enough. And also, maybe, if I tell 10 kids they can chose if they want to live Jewishly or not, maybe only 5 chose to do it. Maybe it’s not a demographically successful approach. But looking at the trends nationally, Jews today are not basing their life decisions on whether their children will be ethnically Jewish - whether they will have two Jewish parents. The Pew Survey in 2020 showed that of Jews that married from 1990 to 1999, 37% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2000 to 2009, 45% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2010 to 2019, 61% had a non Jewish spouse. So as things move forward, fewer kids are growing up in households with two Jewish parents, and those kids are often not being raised to be Jewish. The Pew survey noted that when surveyed, 91% families with two Jewish parents reported that they were raising their children Jewish by religion. In families with only one Jewish parent, only 29% were raising their kids to be Jewish by religion.

These numbers might alarm you. They do not particularly alarm me. And that’s because they effectively fit the philosophy I described of why to be Jewish. It’s a spiritual practice of seeking the meaning of life, and the fact that some people opt out, or aren’t raised even knowing about opting in, is just part of living in a modern American society with infinite choice. We can’t effectively compel with guilt, or with a lack of alternatives today. Lots of Americans today are opting out of religion. If you were born Jewish in Minsk in 1889, there weren’t a lot of other lifestyle options available to you. Today, you can be, or not be, whatever you want.

But that brings me back to conversion, and introduction to Judaism. Some of you know, but many of you do not, that I’ve been the Director of Intro to Judaism for the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association for the past three years. ITJ as it is know is Pittsburgh’s course for conversion, or simply learning the basics of Judaism, for almost all the liberal synagogues in Western Pennsylvania. When I started teaching the class in 2019 we had roughly 10 students, and Sinai had roughly 10, and Rodef had 10. In 2022 we combined efforts across all the synagogues in the area and had about 30 students. In 2023 we taught about 45 students. This past year the number of students rose to 56. These rises track with what I experienced in Denver Colorado from 2011 to 2018 - every year we saw more ITJ students and more converts. My last year there, we were running two cohorts of students totalling 110 students. More and more people who learn about Judaism see it as a compelling religious and spiritual practice, and more and more people are converting not because their partner is Jewish and they want to raise the kids Jewish, but because they find Judaism compelling, and they want to live Jewishly, and they want their kids to grow up Jewish.

And it’s beautiful. I’m so lucky to have a front row seat to so many people who come to Judaism on their own. In the words of the Talmud “Those born as Jews may trace their lineage to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the religious pedigree of sincere converts to Judaism derives directly from the Creator.”

Over the last 13 years I’ve been involved in ITJ, I’m seeing fewer couples take the class, but more singles. I want to add on this day which is the beginning of LGBTQIA pride weekend in Pittsburgh, that a significant number of folks who choose to become Jewisg identify as queer or trans. That’s for two reasons: first, the liberal movements in Judaism are welcoming and affirming to the LGBT community. And two, especially for the trans community, for many of them that are in the process of coming into themselves fully and taking on a new name or transitioning to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, they now have the freedom to explore a totally new identity, and that includes their religion. And they often chose Judaism.

You might then ask - well, demographically, will the number of born Jews that stop practicing Judaism be replaced by folks converting into Judaism? That I do not know, and I don’t think it matters. Because again, it’s about the qualitative measure of an individual person's life, and not the overall numbers. And that brings me back to our parsha, which tells us in Numbers 1 that we are to count up the numbers. And list the names.

The Meor Eynayim - Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl , died in 1797 taught the following regarding the numbers and the names. He said:

Hashem Yitborach - our Holy God - sends out the host (angels) to count, and there can not be even one missing Aleph from among them, has veShalom, that they absolutely must always be whole.

And the end of the verse says they are called by their names - for a person’s name is their essence and soul. For the letters of one’s name are their root and their life force. And by them, one serves God, and learns, and prays.

In other words, the reason God commands Moses to write out the names of the Israelites is because each and every one of us that counts ourselves as a Jew, God records our names and does not miss even a letter of a single person, because our Hebrew name is our soul, our root and our life force - in Hebrew, shemo shel adam hu nishmato, shoresho vechiuto . If we pursue Torah we hold the secret to life.
Not everyone is going to chose Judaism. But so many people do - both folks born to Jewish parents and folks that are not. My point is: Judaism is not going anywhere. It meaningful and beautiful, and people have sought out its wisdom for thousands of years. Regardless of how many or how few choose to live a Jewish life, as long as human beings seek meaning and joy and purpose, Judaism will exist, and for the people that chose it, those born Jewish and those who come to it later, Judaism will thrive.

As we come to Shavuot and reenact Sinai, Jews get to receive Torah all over again for themselves, and take stock of what that means. And of course, our additional reading for Shavuot will be the book of Ruth, the story of a woman who finds personal meaning and common cause with the Jewish people and explains ‘your people are my people, you God is my God.’ BaMidbar - Numbers - is the parsha of demographic counting, but the texts asks us to give over our names, one by one, to God. And Shavuot is the holiday of the convert - when we all stand at sinai and get to chose Judaism again, and rediscover the secret to life. Shabbat Shalom.

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The University and the Jew - Shabbat HaGadol 5785

4/12/2025

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This is one of those sermons that comes with a proverbial warning label - so here goes. If you’ve been struggling with turning off the news or needing to stem the flow of disturbing things that reaches your eyeballs or your ears, if you, like me, wake up and decide that you can’t stomach whatever dubious decision has been unleashed from Washington DC, if you sit at the breakfast table choosing to do NY Times on your phone, but not click over to look at the headlines, you might want to step outside for a few minutes. This dvar torah is about the history of the Jew and University, and the perilous position that Jews in universities feel right now, but it will also mention recent forced immigrant deportations. If you were hoping for something on the lighter side entering passover, I’m sorry to disappoint you. If you want to step outside, I understand. There is only a finite amount of stressful contemplation a person can endure in a day or a week, and maybe you’re not up for more anxiety.

(pause)

There is nothing more important to the Jewish people than learning. In Pirkei Avot we are taught - if nearly all the commandments, 612 of them, were stacked on one side of a scale, and only one mitzvah - Talmud Torah, the mitzvah to learn Torah, was on the other side of the scale, it would equal their weight. In Hebrew the phrase is ‘Talmud Torah knegged Kulam’. And so from Moses to today, our tradition has emphasized the intellect and book learning above all else. And our people were never willing to draw the line at Torah learning. From the geonim in the 9th century learning earth sciences and mathematics, to the physician Maimonides’ studies of the body, in the 13th century to Baruch Spinoza and his exploration of secular philosophy in the mid 17th century, our people have explored intellect and thought. And despite warnings in the Talmud against Greek philosophy and books, Jews have never restricted themselves from learning about the world beyond the yeshiva door. European universities did not actively exclude Jewish students, but the realities of our financial position and our isolated lives within ghettos until the 19th century meant that few Jews could afford to sit and learn secular things. Additionally, even if European universities didn’t exclude Jewish students, they refused to hire Jewish professors until the mid 19th and even the 20th century.

And then we came to America. Most of you know the broad sketches of our peoples story: the vast majority of immigrants to America arrive between 1880 and 1920. They were poor, often illiterate, and thrust from small rural villages in Poland and Ukraine into vast tenements in urban neighborhoods. That first generation worked long hours doing unskilled labor at the sewing machine, in the hopes that their children would have it better than they did. In a letter from the Bintel Brief, the Jewish Daily Forward’s advice column answered by editor Abraham Kahan, a 14 year old girl writes in feeling guilty that her parents can barely feed them on what they earn, but they insist that she continue to get her education instead of dropping out and going to work. Kahan answers in one sentence: she should listen to her parents and stay in school. In a footnote to that story, the scholar Harry Golden tells the story that it was told that immigrant mothers who could not speak English would walk into the new york public library and hold up the fingers on their hand to indicate how many children they had. And the library would issue them that many library cards, and then they would tell their children “Go. Read. Learn.”

So it isn’t any wonder that as soon as the second generation could afford to further their education, they did. So it isn’t any wonder that in his magnum opus on American Jewish History, Howard Sachar records the following.

Famously, the proportion of Jews at elite universities became so high that an anti-semitic quota limiting the number of Jews was established at Harvard by president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1922. It was eventually, under great public pressure, rescinded.

That attitude towards the university as both a place to further the exploration of the mind as well as a catalyst for social mobility for our immigrant grandparents has persisted and stuck. According to a Pew study in 2021, 58% of America Jews hold a college degree. That’s twice the rate of all Americans - 29%. We seek higher education at phenomenal rates. Moving to Pittsburgh seven years ago, I learned that a huge proportion of the Jewish community here today were comprised of meds and eds - doctors and academics. And that means that even if you didn’t go to university, so many of your fellow congregants and Jews here at Beth Shalom derive their livelihoods from universities, and do excellent and groundbreaking scholarship at those universities, and they produce amazing graduates. And those universities and their professors should be a point of pride for each and every person in our community. I’ll be honest: Florida can have this year’s NCAA basketball championship, and Ohio State can have the trophy for football. I wouldn’t trade a hundred NCAA sports trophies for one Jonas Salk, or one Billy Porter, or one Andy Warhol.

So it distresses me to no end that the current White House has decided that rather than laud our incredible American universities, they have instead decided to attack them, to defund them, and to attempt to silence them. Since the new administration took control on January 20, the following has taken place

Ten major universities have had federal funding slashed or eliminated. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, George Washington, NYU, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, University of Minnesota, and University of Southern California. All told $12 billion dollars have been taken away for academic research, PhD programs, and literally everything that university do from teaching assistants to the athletic programs.
The administration eliminated the Department of Education, which both administers and oversees all student aid and loans in the country and oversees funding for things like school lunches to all fifty states and special needs education.
The administration announced that The National Institute of Health would be cut 15%. That money goes to medical research covering literally everything that researchers due. A WESA analysis showed that at just the University of Pittsburgh, that would be a $115 million cut.
The administration suddenly unilaterally canceled the student visas of over 300 undergraduate and graduate students. Several students, including a 30 year old PhD student named Rumiya Ozturk at Tufts, were grabbed off the street by ICE agents and are currently being held in Federal detention centers without due process or access to an attorney. Other students have gone into hiding. Several have fled rather than be detained.

These efforts are not random. They aren’t part of a thoughtful process of Federal cost cutting meant to balance the budget. This is a war on our universities.

The stated reasons for these cuts and visa cancellations is the really scary, really pernicious part. The claim made by the administration is that the universities that were cut were cut because they didn’t do a good enough job fighting anti-semitism on campus. The claim made about the students whose visas were canceled is that they were present or participated in on campus protests against the war in Gaza. The further claim has been made, without any evidence, that the protestors are supporting Hamas and therefore are terrorists.

I want to be very careful, and I want to be very explicit here: the United States government has every right to deport a terrorist who supports Hamas. Full stop. But let me also say very clearly, this administration is not deporting terrorists in a good-will effort to keep Jews safe. They are attacking free speech and protest and using gestapo tactics to intimidate and terrify anyone who opposes the word of those who are in power. And it is doing it in a way that uses us, the Jews, as the excuse. We’re being used.

Around the same time I was becoming outraged at these actions, political commentators and rabbis alike were also beginning to take notice.

Matt Bai at the Washington Post said this in an op-ed: “Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.” Our colleague Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky at Anshe Hesed in New York said “I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished.” And our colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous said this in a sermon last month: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground for its normalization. This administration’s attacks do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”

ICE canceling student visas and abducting and deporting students is the confluence of two historic insecurities for the Jewish people: being excluded from universities because of our national identity, as was done to us in 1938 in Germany, and being rendered stateless and without citizenship or protection, as was the case for the Jewish people in Europe before the emancipation of the late 18th and 19th century.

An attack on American universities is an attack on wisdom, and knowledge, and learning, the intellect, and the intellectual. And an attack on knowledge is an attack on the Jew.

This whole thing to me is illogical and confusing. Destroying our medical research institutions, defunding our scientists, squelching speech on campus, dissuading foreign students from coming here due to the fear that they might end up in an ICE detention center – what does it accomplish? It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Degrading our nation’s experts in a thousand different fields from mechanical engineering to mathematics to medicine and literature and history makes us as a nation worse at innovating and creating.

I suspect there are other motives at work. Motives of creating false scapegoats and boogeymen to distract some people from complex problems. Motives of getting payback against the liberal elite and their fancy Ivy League colleges. Motives of continuing to set America against itself. Listen, I went to college and I use my hoity toity sub-Ivy League education to do my job of learning and teaching the Jewish tradition to our community. And when an HVAC technician with a high school diploma from Beaver County comes over to my house to install a new boiler, I pay him with the money I make at my job, and maybe he takes some of his money and puts it away for a college education for his kids. But we’re not enemies, and I don’t want to make him my enemy, even if we voted differently in the last election. I don’t understand how animus and division serves us as Americans, but I do know that it’s part of a historical playbook that I really really don’t like.

Tonight we Jews sit down to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, our going out from under the thumb of a tyrant that made us subservient. There is a small matter in the story of our oppression and slavery that escaped my notice until a text study a did a few months ago. Our hassidut class learned the following text: In Exodus 5:7 we learn that Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters no longer longer provide straw for the bricks , but that the Israelites would be required to reach the same quota of bricks while now having to gather both straw and mud to fabricate them.

Rabbi Hanoch Henich HaCohen of Alexander taught that this is a difficulty. Why would Pharoah make it more difficult for Israel by not giving them straw? As such, it would serve as a loss to him (Pharaoh), that they wouldn’t complete their daily requirement of bricks. It would be better for him to give them straw only in order that it should be harder for them to produce double the bricks from what they would normally produce in a day!
Rabbi Hanoch Henich concludes that it is an attempt by Pharaoh to get the Jews to worry constantly about their material state so that they forget their spiritual state. He writes, “For Pharaoh the wicked wanted the Israelites to not have the time to contemplate their purpose - how to get out of their impure spiritual state and towards holiness. Only that they should perpetually ruminate, even when they weren’t working, how to get straw.”

But back to the act of the Pharaoh on the simple level - it’s illogical that rather than squeezing maximum financial benefit from the slaves for the Egyptian empire, they’re simply being punitive and cruel. It is an uncomfortable parallel to today.
I told my friend Natasha Berman about the topic I was going to speak on, mostly as a warning. And she asked me ‘but does it have a hopeful ending?’ Maybe? I don’t know. That’s up to me and you, I think.

I do know that the goal is really to be clear that the university is the home of the American intellect, and the creation of our collective American intellectual home was fashioned in great part by Jews. The intellectual state is a primary component of the spiritual state that Rabbi Hanoch Henech speaks of.

I want to add one more thing, related to the upcoming holiday of passover, and that is in regards to the four children. We know them as chacham, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the one that does not know how to ask. Whats strange about this formulation is that the four children are arranged illogically. Shouldn’t the four be tzaddik, rasha, tam, v’eino yodea lishol – righteous, wicked, simple, and one that does not know how to ask? But it isn’t.

Our rabbis are trying to tell us here that the path to God in our haggadah is not through simple observance and piety, but rather through a concerted effort of learning and study - which of course ultimately leads us to observance and holiness. The passover ideal is to be learned, and in becoming learned, to know God. And we become learned and knowledgeable of God in all ways and through all paths, both secular and religious.

We must defend the university, and its professors, and its researchers. In the text of the Talmud we learned for the siyyum for the fast of firstborns on Thursday, I was blessed to learn a famous pithy quote that occurs in Talmud Chagigah 9b - one who learns something one hundred times is not comparable to one who learns something one hundred and one times.
We learn and we learn and we learn to push the boundaries of human knowledge and better the world through the power of knowledge. We must rise to the challenge of protecting our universities however we can, and with urgency. We know something better if we learn it 102 times and better if we learn it 103 times, but to do that, we must have teachers to teach it and places to study it. Shabbat Shalom and a Zissen Pesach.

text of R' Hanoch Henich HaCohen regarding Pharaoh and the bricks and straw.

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Human Autonomy should be a Basic Right

2/9/2025

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Dvar Torah Beshallach 5785

I generally prefer to select my own sermon topics from the myriad of interesting possibilities in the weekly parsha. But alas, this week is not one of those weeks, because you all know that the president made a policy statement this week in a joint press conference with Bibi Netanyahu about the future of Gaza. And so we have to talk about it.
I don’t think you missed it, because how could you, but if you missed the announcement, President Trump said several things. First, that Palestinians should be relocated to Egypt and Jordan. Second, that the United States will come in and take over Gaza. Third, that we will QUOTE “own it”, and fourth that Gaza would be redeveloped into the Riviera of the Mediterranean.

The reaction was swift and unforgiving. Most people saw it either as magical thinking, or wildly impractical, or blatantly against international law, or wholly unjust and immoral. I will say one nice thing about the plan, which is that it is an actual plan. Before President Trump proposed his idea, nobody really had a plan for who would oversee Gaza in the near term, or who would rebuild it. So at least it’s a plan.

The proposal is part of what we have come to see as the Trumpian world view, and that is land is a valuable asset, while people, particularly foreign people, are a liability. Gaza is simply 141 square miles of empty potential, waiting to be transformed into golf courses and Mar a Lago - Rafah. To further this idea, Trump believes that peoples compete for resources. That every dollar sent to Mexico for avocados comes out of the pockets of California avocado growers, that every undocumented immigrant in the US is taking a job away from an unemployed American.

Trump is, in this respect, a man who had a very successful theory on one aspect of the economy, and now applies that theory to everything in a very ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ approach to the universe. Trump knows how to develop hundreds of acres of bare land into a golf course. But golf courses are a very specific type of investment - there’s a lot of empty land, some very rich men wandering around paying lots of money to chase a little dimpled ball, and relatively few employees needed to keep the thing going. Trump sees rubble and imagines a golf course. Only, golf courses have no people on them, except the very rich. So Trump says ‘ok, everybody who isn’t very rich can go to Jordan or Egypt. Only, of course, Jordan and Egypt didn’t agree to that. This is the one part of Trump’s calculus I don’t really understand. Here’s a man who doesn’t like foreign nationals who are applying for residency in this country and wants to use the US Army to detain and deport 2 million of them, but he looks at the heads of state of Jordan and Egypt and says to them ‘you should take 2 million foreign nationals into your countries permanently.’ I don’t really follow the logic, other than Trump believing that its totally reasonable to decide to uproot and relocate people anywhere in the world, as long as that place isn’t the United States of America. I also don’t really even follow the logic of redeveloping Gaza, which is 9,000 miles away, when Haiti, a tropical nation only 150 miles away, is in desperate need of aid and redevelopment.

The reason the world, including much of the American Jewish community, reacted so negatively to this proposal is the first step in the effort to redevelop Gaza is the removal of all the residents. I think Trump thinks that the Palestinians will all take a second passport in Jordan and Egypt, and live there for a few years until his contractors have finished building the each resorts and the golf courses, and then they’ll come back to Gaza and work as waiters and line chefs and Middle East peace will flourish.

The problem with the thinking is that the two people most involved in this situation, the Israelis and the Palestinians, both have deep histories with displacement and relocation, and neither of them have any good memories of it. For Palestinians, many of them were displaced to Gaza and the West Bank in 1948, and many have been hoping to return for 77 years now. For Israelis, they were a stateless people for 2000 years, and at the conclusion of the Holocaust in Europe in 1945, they were unable to return home. My own grandmother left her home town of Rakov in 1943, never to return again. Not only that, but her bitterness and anguish over the pain of the injustices done to her and her whole family were so deep that she has told her children and her grandchildren to never return to Poland again as long as we live. And none of us ever has. That’s three generations of intergenerational bitterness in my family towards people in a country that I’ve never even been to.

Every one of us in this room and on zoom has Jewish relatives who came to this country on a boat or a plane because they were unwelcome or cast out of some other place, and so they created a new home for themselves here in this country. Most people that leave home do so because they have little or no other options.

This is the part of the Gaza redevelopment plan that Trump, and some Israelis, are missing. And by the way, the Israeli newspaper Maariv did a survey and found this week that 78% of Israelis polled backed the plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza. What they forget is that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about the feeling of being forced off your land to begin with. I’m not even sure its about one specific Palestinian families desire to return to one specific house in Jaffa or Netzeret, but rather the knowledge that they were forced to leave a place and now have no right to choose where or whether they can return. People want the free agency to go places and live their lives with dignity and respect. They do not want another people to decide what is best for them.

And of course we know this lesson all too well as Jews, because it is the essence of the story of the Exodus. Pharaoh wanted to control all the Israelites - to determine their fates, to rule over them and deny them the free will of free people. It is a frequent misconception that the original demand of the Israelites was to go out from slavery and leave Egypt and travel to Israel and be a free people. That is, actually, not at all what the Israelites asked for. Two weeks ago, in Parshat Shemot, chapter 5, we read the following:
וְאַחַר בָּאוּ מֹשֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֶל־פַּרְעֹה כֹּה־אָמַר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיָחֹגּוּ לִי בַּמִּדְבָּר׃
Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says יהוה, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness.”

But Pharaoh said, “Who is Adonai that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know Adonai, nor will I let Israel go.”

In other words, the Israelites weren’t demanding that they cease being slaves and be given total freedom. They were only asking for a couple days off in the desert. They wanted a modicum of control of their own lives, and Pharaoh said no. The problem here is not that the Israelites want total self determination. The problem is that denying them any semblance of control over their lives is intolerable. Ultimately, Pharaoh refuses to give them any self-determination, and so God, Moses, and Aaron begin asserting their demand for rights more and more, and finally it results in the people completely going free from under Pharaoh’s thumb.

‘Gee that’s interesting rabbi’, you may say to yourself. ‘But what does it mean going forward for Israel and the Jewish people?’ The answer is a resounding ‘I don’t know.’ At high holidays I gave a sermon about two soccer teams in which the thesis was ‘these two peoples are interdependent, and their futures are tied together.’ And I still believe that. In contrast, the proposal to simply remove Palestinians from Gaza as a solution is the opposite of interdependence - it is instead radical amputation - it proposes that Jews cannot live with Palestinians and therefore permanent relocation and racial and religious separation are the only solution. That would be a very dangerous suggestion because of what it would mean for the rest of Israeli society. If Israel can’t figure out a way to live alongside Palestinian society in Gaza, can it live alongside Palestinians in the West Bank, who enter and exit Israel for work every day? Can it live with the 21% of the population that are Israeli Arabs, who are clustered in predominantly Arab cities like Natzeret and Umm Al Fahm and Abu Snan and Sachnin.
One of the challenges of the Trump plan is that it feels like empty words. Israelis fought a war that demolished 70% of the buildings in Gaza, but now someone else claims they’re going to clean up the mess. To that end, I can see why so many Israelis like Trumps plan - because if it were to come to pass, Israelis don’t have to provide security , or provide food aid, or rebuild the mess. The Americans will do it. And that sounds fairly unlikely to me. I could see a way forward in which the US, the EU, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel all collaborate to rebuild Gaza together. Perhaps they could even placate Donald Trump by letting the Army Corps of Engineers build him a beachfront resort. Or maybe a coalition of states rebuilding together sounds just as improbable as Trump building golf courses in Rafah. I concede that maybe I’m too optimistic.

In our Torah, God tells the Israelites that God will split the sea and take them out of Egypt. But, famously, in a midrash in the Talmud, the rabbis tell us that none of the Israelites were brave enough to enter the water. And then Nachshon Ben Amminidav walked in, and the sea parted after him. In other words, yes God will help you cross the sea. But you have to walk into it. You have to put one foot in front of the other. There is no quick and easy solution after the war for Israel and Gaza. The solution for both will involve either increased cooperation and collaboration that will slowly, over a generation, lead to the first steps towards mutual trust, or just another generation in the wilderness of animosity.
The parsha this week, beshallach, includes the song of the seas, which appears in the morning shacharit prayer every single day of the year without fail. It has one sentence that always gives me pause - Adonai Ish Milchamah - Adonai Shemo - God is a man of war, Adonai is God’s name. The implication could be that God was with Israel in their battle with Pharaoh, although to be honest, there was no battle with Pharoah - the Israelites ran and God closed the sea on them. But in general, the sentiment is appreciated - when you find yourself in combat, when you are in a foxhole, God is with you.

After the battle, when it’s time to clean up, though, the responsibility to rebuild isn’t on God, but upon humans. In a section of our prayerbook we read on shabbat right after ein keloheinu, or realistically, a section we skip almost every week, it says the following:

אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא: תַּלְמִידֵי חֲכָמִים מַרְבִּים שָׁלוֹם בָּעוֹלָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״וְכׇל בָּנַיִךְ לִמּוּדֵי ה׳ וְרַב שְׁלוֹם בָּנָיִךְ״.
Rabbi Elazar said that Rabbi Ḥanina said: Torah scholars increase peace in the world, as it is said: “And all your children [banayikh] shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13). If all the children of Israel are taught of the Lord, there will be peace for all.
אַל תִּקְרֵי ״בָּנָיִךְ״ אֶלָּא ״בּוֹנָיִךְ״.
The Sages interpreted this verse homiletically: Do not read your children [banayikh], but your builders [bonayikh]. Torah scholars are those who build peace for their generation.

God may be an ish milchamah, a man of war, but Torah scholars are the builders, or the rebuilders. We are called on to build literally, and by building literally, our tradition tells us ‘great will be the peace of your children.’ So I welcome the idea of turning Gaza into the riviera of the middle east. But you can’t solve past injustices by committing a host of brand new ones. It must be that the long, slow process of rebuilding be done by many people and together, and that the main goal of any construction projects be in solving a generational refugee problem rather than creating a brand new one yet again.

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