In Response to Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”

I think that I shall never witness
A poem as lovely as photosynthesis

Where sugar is made without a fight
From carbon dioxide, water, and light

You might come to synagogue to get your Torah fill
But only in leaves will you find the pigment chlorophyll

That miraculous chemical that in sun or in rain
Serves as the base of the entire food chain

Let’s strive remember that biological scheme
When we say Baruch Atah Adonai HaMa’ariv Aravim 

O, poems are made by Average Joes
But only God can make glucose

#MeToo

From their very first day together in the office, the boss’s eyes were fixated on the new intern. The intern was inexperienced -- a first job. The boss, on the other hand, had been there many years, and oversaw the company’s nearly 200 staff members -- including the attractive new intern.

Despite inexperience, the intern was competent, a quick learner, eager to please. It was only a matter a days before the boss offered to take the young intern underwing, with promises of advancing their career. Within a year, the young intern was hired as a full time employee, and was soon promoted to head of a small division -- reporting directly to the boss. The young protege was grateful for this career success. And the boss felt satisfied to have the young protege at only an arm’s reach.

And that’s when things got messy. The advances started out small. A comment from the boss about how the young protege’s clothes looked particularly nice that day. A dirty joke. The young protege, clearly uncomfortable, forced a laugh, and then tried to resume working. Feeling the sting of the cold shoulder, the boss later that day came by the young protege’s office unannounced, and said, “I got you this job. I can take it away from you anytime I please.”

A week later, the young protege came to work and found a note taped to the desk. It read: “My office, 11am.” The protege knocked on the office door at the appointed time, whereupon the boss requested that they sleep together. When the young protege refused, the boss insisted, this time forcibly grabbing the young protege. Fearful, the young protege fled from the office.

Within hours, a new note had been taped to the young protege’s desk. This time, it read: “You’re fired, effective immediately. I’ll see to it that you never work in this industry again.”

***

If this story sounds familiar, there’s a good reason why. Of course, this story sounds as if it could have been ripped from recent news headlines. But there’s another reason why you may feel like you’ve heard this story before. Because this is the story of Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read about Joseph, now living in Egypt, working as a young servant in the household of the family Potiphar. Joseph quickly arouses the attention of Mrs. Potiphar, and he rises through the ranks of the household. Twice Mrs. Potiphar makes sexual advances towards Joseph -- and when he refuses, she sees to it that his reputation is ruined. She spreads lies about him, he is fired from his job, and in a particularly painful twist of fate, it is he, the victim, who goes to jail for sexual harassment.

Over the centuries, the Jewish people has thousands of times heard this story from the Torah. But for many of us, it’s only recently that we’ve been able to truly hear stories like this from within our own community. We need only reverse the gender roles, and the story of Mrs. Potiphar easily becomes the story of Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer.

Over the past few weeks, many men, including me, have been shocked to discover just how pervasive sexual harassment is in our society. Many women, by contrast, are totally unsurprised -- aware that this problem has been lurking beneath the shadows all along, grateful that it is finally being brought out into the light.

This evening, I’d like to join the national conversation about our culture of sexual harassment and assault. As a man, I still have much learning to do -- and for that reason, this sermon relies heavily on conversations I’ve had and articles I’ve read written by women. One thing I’ve read time and again is that if our culture is going to change, the burden of pointing out what is wrong cannot fall exclusively upon women. It is in that spirit that I share these reflections tonight -- not as an expert, but rather as a novice who is eager to learn and do better.

In my conversations with women, I learned that the Joseph story lays bear a foundational truth: that sexual harassment is often not about the thrill of sex, but rather, is about the abuse of power. Mrs. Potiphar is able to prey upon Joseph because he has less power than she does. He is a mere servant in her household, while she is the lady of the manor. He is a foreigner, an outsider, the lone Hebrew in all of Egypt. She, by contrast, comes from the finest Egyptian lineage, a person of pedigree, entrenched in the aristocracy. In the narrative world of our story, she wields tremendous power, and he, none. It is as if Mrs. Potiphar is testing the limits of her power, to see what she can get away with. Similarly, the abuse of power can be seen in the many recent reports of sexual harassment. As author Rebecca Traister observes: “The stories of hotel-room meetings, requests for massages, professional interactions undertaken naked — they all speak of the abusive thrill gained not from sex but from the imposition of your will on someone who has no ability to resist.”

The abuse of power not only leads to sexual assault, it also allows for the cover-up. Who would Joseph call upon to report his abuser’s behavior? Who would believe him? Mrs. Potiphar, on the other hand, can activate her considerable social influence, and not only evade responsibility, but see to it that her refuser is punished. It’s no coincidence that many of the abusers who’ve recently been outed were public figures with significant klout. These men had at their disposal powerful media apparatuses -- a megaphone pointed at society. Their victims report campaigns of intimidation, the threat of being removed from a project, the planting of slanderous stories in the media -- even the fear of physical violence, stalking the victim at their home and threatening to harm their family. With power like this at their disposal, abusers felt emboldened in their abusive behavior, believing they could evade any consequences.

Of course, not all cases of sexual harassment are committed in the glamorous studios of Hollywood or in the glossy boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Just this week, Time magazine named as its 2017 person of the year The Silence Breakers -- the women, and sometimes men, of every socioeconomic status, of every skin color and ethnicity who’ve stood up and said enough is enough. The article features stories of famous musicians and hollywood stars -- but also stories of lobbyists, computer engineers, farmworkers,and hotel housekeepers. Notably, the magazine’s cover photo also shows an arm, belonging to a body, but with the owner’s face hidden from view -- an acknowledgement of the countless victims who must remain silent out of continued fear for their own safety, but whose trauma is nevertheless seen and honored.

Kira Pollack, director of photography for the “Person of the Year” issue, describes the experience of bringing this disparate group of victims together for the cover shoot: “you have these women all in the same room together, they probably will never be in the same room again … and there’s this very moving energy to it all, [that they have something in common,] that the thread that they’ve all shared [is the experience of abuse.]”

This feeling of shared experience explains the power of the #metoo campaign on social media -- a hashtag that, in its first 24 hours, had been used in more than 12 million Facebook posts. The critical word here is the second one: me too. Also me. #MeToo allows victims of sexual assault or harassment to know that they are not alone -- that the problem is not in the victims, but in our society. And when victims realize that they are not alone, that the fault is not theirs, they may feel more empowered to come out of the shadows. As the Time magazine spread puts it: “When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.”

There are many reasons why a victim of sexual assault might have difficulty coming forward. Like Joseph, they may fear that if they name their accuser, then they, the victim, will be blamed. But there are still subtler reasons why a victim might remain silent: the very real fallout that accompanies a trauma, the feelings of shame, the fear of being forever branded as a survivor. Additionally, many women report an uncertainty over whether they could even participate in the #MeToo campaign -- wondering whether their experience of harassment was serious enough to merit the use of the hashtag.

But therein lies another key to the power of this movement. All offenses are recognized as legitimate. To be sure, certain offenses are morally or legally more disturbing than others. There is a difference between sexual harassment and sexual assault -- a difference between the male office worker who sneaks a glance down his female colleague’s shirt and the forcible sexual violence. Nevertheless, the #metoo movement recognizes the seriousness of them all. These offenses may be situated on a moral and legal spectrum, but all of these offenses exist as symptoms of the same systemic problem. Businesswoman Amina Sow makes a helpful analogy: “[We’ve] stuffed all [our] harassment memories in an emotional trash compactor because there are just so many. Now the trash compactor is broken, and everything is coming up.”

We can’t put the trash back into the compactor. The problem has finally been brought out into the light of day for everyone, especially men, to finally see.

In the best of cases, this new awareness has caused men to reexamine their pasts -- to search our memories for times when we should have acted differently than we did. For some men, this self-searching has led to a public, if non-specific apology -- often times in the form of a social media post, utilizing the hashtag #itwasme. Alexandra Schwartz of The New Yorker argues that such generalized confessions, while well intentioned, may only serve to further trivialize the problem -- seeking public forgiveness for a private offense. For other men, this self-searching may highlight past mistakes, and could indeed lead to future behavioral change. Still other men may feel that their conscience is totally clear.

But regardless of how we assess our participation in the problem, all of us are implicated in it. Even if we were not the boss who made sexual advances towards a subordinate, we were the colleague who did not step forward and thereby allowed such a workplace environment to persist. Even if we were not the cad who made the misogynist joke, we were the ones who chuckled, or at the very least, said nothing. By our very participation society, all us of are implicated. As writer Rebecca Solnit puts it, we are implicated “[by the way] we raise boys, in what [our culture] define[s] as erotic, in how men [congratulate] each other [for their sexual conquests -- promulgating] the idea that dominating women enhances their status.”

We are quick to dismiss these behaviors -- calling it “locker room talk” or claiming that “boys will be boys.” Such excuses do us no favors. Claiming that “boys will be boys” only deepens the problem. It gives men and boys a pass for our inappropriate behavior. It assumes that we will someday, on our own, come around to responsible action. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Instead, it reinforces the idea that boys and men will rarely be held accountable for our actions. There’s a t-shirt that my wife, Leah, recently showed me that gets at the core of this problem. Printed on the shirt in square block letters, it says: “Boys will be boys.” But then, that phrase is partially scribbled out, as if the wearer of the shirt changed his mind, and instead, the shirt reads, “Boys will be -- good human beings!” Boys will be good human beings -- but only if we teach them to.

I recently asked a female friend if she thought that anything would change. Without even giving it a second’s pause, she said: “It already has.” She’s right. Something has changed in our society -- a new conversation, a new accountability. We owe it to ourselves to continue pursuing that change.

The Joseph story may sound all too familiar -- in part because, although we’ve read it thousands and thousands of time, the story always ends the same way. We, by contrast, have an opportunity to change the story -- to actively push ourselves, to grow in understanding, to risk being better than we have been. Let us not miss the opportunity.

__________

Editorial note: Stylistically/structurally, this sermon is inspired by Rabbi Janet Marder’s sermon entitled “Scenes from a Marriage.”

Gratitude

There’s a famous mental exercise that anthropologists use to study human societies. In the exercise, they imagine that an alien, who has never experienced life on earth, visits a certain country to observe their culture. Everything that the alien sees, she’s seeing for the first time. And looking at the world through the alien’s eyes, anthropologists are better able to scientifically observe the quirky behaviors that define human culture.

Let us act as amateur anthropologists for a moment. Let us pretend that an alien has come to earth for the first time. Her flying saucer happens to land in a country called the United States of America, on a holiday weekend called Thanksgiving. The alien doesn’t speak English, so she doesn’t know what this word “Thanksgiving” means. But she looks around her, and tries to understand the meaning of the holiday based on her observations. She sees that we Americans prepare a giant feast, where we eat and drink to excess. We go shopping -- and collectively, we spend over eight billion dollars. Occasionally, people are killed in a shopping stampede. On TV, we watch a lavish parade where celebrities are pulled down the street on glittering floats, followed by a competition where we award fancy dogs with prizes based on which one is the showiest. And over the weekend, we cheer for our favorite college football teams to beat our most hated rival.

Observing these rituals, our alien visitor would be unlikely to guess the meaning of the word “Thanksgiving.” In fact, she might reasonably conclude that Thanksgiving is devoted to obsessing over things we want, rather than cultivating gratitude for the things we have.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Thanksgiving. I love gathering with family and cooking together. I love staying up late playing boardgames in front of the fireplace. I even love the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the sheer joy on my child’s face -- and I admit, on my face too -- as a three-story-tall Elmo balloon goes floating down Sixth Avenue.

But I wonder about that alien observer. I wonder if there are ways in which we might help her to see -- to observe, through our behavior -- that Thanksgiving is intended to be a holiday of gratitude.

I’ve heard it said that the purpose of religion is to practice gratitude -- though, as is the case with Thanksgiving, this purpose sometimes gets lost in the trappings. The word “Judaism,” for example, literally derives from the Hebrew word for “gratitude.” We read in this week’s Torah portion the birth story of our religion’s namesake, Judah, and how his mother named him Yehudah, meaning, “I give thanks.” To be a Jew -- that is, to be descended from the Tribe of Judah -- means to give thanks, to practice gratitude.

This evening, I’d like to look back to the so called original Thanksgiving, that shared feast between the Puritans and the Wampanoag Tribe, to see what it can teach us about how to be a good Jew -- that is, to see what it can teach us about how to be good at practicing gratitude. Let us acknowledge up front that our popular imagination of that original Thanksgiving largely whitewashes the many centuries of mistreatment that indigenous people on this continent have suffered at the hands of European settlers. Nevertheless, the Puritans and Wampanoag did indeed enjoy relatively peaceful relations for nearly fifty years -- an unfortunately rare such example of cooperation and mutual respect. Their original Thanksgiving feast embodies two models of gratitude from which we can still derive wisdom today -- the model practiced by the Puritans, and the model practiced by the Wampanoag.

Let us start by examining the Puritans’ model of gratitude, which we might characterize as a gratitude of survival. The Pilgrims landed at the tip of Cape Cod in the fall of 1620. During their first brutal winter, more than half of their population died from exposure to the cold, scurvy, and contagious disease. Their prospects for survival on this continent looked pretty grim. That spring, they learned from the Wampanoag a few basic wilderness skills to help them adapt to their new environment: how to plant and harvest corn, a crop they’d never seen before; how to extract sap from maple trees; how to catch fish in the rivers; how to identify poisonous plants. That summer, they enjoyed a fruitful harvest. And in the fall, they organized a feast of gratitude that that first brutal winter was now behind them, that they might indeed have a chance of survival on this continent -- the first Thanksgiving.

It is said that the Pilgrims may have modeled their harvest feast on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The Pilgrims, after all, were a religious community, and were highly literate in the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. They saw themselves as the New Israelites, liberated not from the slavery of Egypt, but from the Anglican Church. They saw North America as their New Promised Land -- their difficult Atlantic voyage and that first brutal winter on the continent as their 40 years of wandering in the desert. And just as the ancient Israelites celebrated their having survived by enjoying a festive Sukkot meal, so too did the Puritans establish the tradition of a harvest feast -- the first Thanksgiving.

This model of gratitude -- the gratitude of survival -- acknowledges the precariousness of life: the challenges of a harsh winter, the uncertainty of any harvest season. But the practice of gratitude is a choice. The Puritans might have just as easily felt despair that half their camp had died that first brutal winter. The Israelites, for their part, do indeed complain -- and complain at length -- about having to wander through the wilderness. These are reasonable feelings. When difficult times challenge us, we naturally tend towards anger and disappointment. Gratitude does not require that we ignore these feelings. Rather, it empowers us to harness these feelings to lessen our own suffering. Living with an awareness that life sometimes disappoints, we can learn not to take life for granted.

Would our Thanksgiving celebrations be made more meaningful if were felt more acutely the precariousness of life? God forbid there should be more suffering in our lives. But instead of focusing on enjoying what we have, could we spend part of Thanksgiving weekend getting in touch with what we’ve lost, acknowledging the ways in which we’ve suffered, and learning not to take life for granted -- celebrating that despite it all, here we are?

This is the gratitude of survival -- the gratitude of the Puritans: the gratitude of finding small blessings amidst life’s real challenges. Let us turn our attention now to the other participants in that first Thanksgiving feast, to the Wampanoag.

We might characterize the Wampanoag model of gratitude as an attitude of plenty. Over many centuries, the Wampanoag learned how to live in harmony with Mother Earth. They studied the natural world -- its weather patterns, animal behaviors, cycles of plant life, the movement of the stars and the sun -- and held them all in highest esteem. They learned to use every part of a slain deer: its meat for food, its skin for clothing, its bones for creating tools. Theirs was a thanksgiving not of having survived in a difficult environment, but rather a thanksgiving that the natural world provides exactly what is needed, that there are always plenty of resources to go around.

Our Jewish tradition, too, knows this model of gratitude -- the gratitude of plenty. Our best model of it may come from the Chanukkah story. Chanukkah could easily be cast as a story that expresses gratitude of survival. The Maccabees, after all, survived the cultural prohibitions that were placed upon them by the Syrian Greeks. But the Chanukkah story doesn’t end with survival. We all know the story: after the Maccabees returned from the battlefield to the Temple of Jerusalem and went to light to the menorah, there were only enough oil to last one night. But miraculously, the oil lasted for eight nights! The Maccabees might have chosen not to light the menorah at all -- knowing full well that there wasn’t enough oil. But instead, they adopted an attitude of plenty. Rather than obsessing over what they didn’t have, the Macabees celebrated what they did have -- an act of gratitude. They embodied the Jewish maxim: “Who is rich? The person who is happy with what he has” (Pirkei Avot 4:4).

The great Medieval Jewish ethicist, Rabbi Bachya ibn Pekuda, notes that a conundrum keeps us from more often adopting an attitude of plenty. The conundrum is that physical pleasures can never fully be gratified. For example, things that are tasty to eat continue to be tasty to eat, even after our hunger for them for has been satiated. The mouth and the stomach are not in sync -- and this keeps us from feeling satisfied with what we have.

How would our Thanksgiving celebration be made more meaningful if we adopted an attitude of plenty -- if, instead of eating to excess, we ate a normal sized meal, to acknowledge that we daily have more than enough? What if instead of spending eight billion dollars on Black Friday, and by comparison, a paltry $170 million on Giving Tuesday, the numbers were reversed?

And so we see two models of gratitude: the gratitude of survival, embodied by the Pilgrims and the holiday of Sukkot; and the gratitude of plenty, embodied by the Wampanoag and the holiday of Chanukkah. The former can help us not to take life for granted; the later can help us to experience life feeling that what we have is enough.

If our alien anthropologist saw us adopting these two models of gratitude, she might come to understand the true meaning of Thanksgiving. And in so doing, we might come to understand the true meaning of being Jewish -- which is, to be descended from the Tribe of Judah, whose name means, “I am grateful.”

Kein y’hi ratzon -- may this be so.

Truth and Faith

Natural Religion

In contemporary philosophy, natural religion refers to the project of using the cognitive faculties that are “natural” to human beings -- reason, sense-perception, introspection -- to investigate religious or theological matters.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abraham as … Logician

Rabbi Hiyya taught: Terah [Abraham's father] was a worshipper of idols. One time he had to travel to a place, and he left Abraham in charge of his store. When a person would come in to buy idols, Abraham would ask: How old are you? The customer would reply: fifty or sixty. Abraham would then respond: Woe to the person who is sixty years old and worships something made today -- the customer would be embarrassed, and would leave.

A customer entered carrying a dish full of flour. She said to him: this is for you, offer it before these idols. Abraham took a club in his hands and broke all of the idols, and placed the club in the hands of the biggest idol. When his father returned, he asked: who did all of this? Abraham replied: I can't hide it from you -- a customer came carrying a dish of flour and told me to offer it before the idols. I did, and one of them said 'I will eat it first,' and another said 'I will eat it first.' The biggest one rose, took a club, and smashed the rest of them. Terah said: what, do you think you can trick me? They don't have cognition! Abraham said: Do your ears hear what your mouth is saying?

Bereshit Rabbah 38:13 (c. 400 CE, Land of Israel)

… Naturalist

And Abram saw the sun shining upon the earth, and Abram said unto himself: “Surely now this sun that shines upon the earth is God, whom I shall serve.” And Abram served the sun in that day and he prayed to it, and when evening came the sun set as usual, and Abram said within himself, “Surely this cannot be God.” And night darkened over him, and he lifted up his eyes toward the west, north, south, and east, and he saw that the sun had vanished from the earth, and the day became dark. And Abram saw the stars and moon before him, and he said, “Surely the moon is the God who created the whole earth as well as humankind, and behold these stars are God’s servants.” And Abram served the moon and prayed to it all that night. And in the morning when it was light and the sun shone upon the earth as usual. And Abram said, “Neither the sun nor the moon is God. God must be the One Who created them all.”

Sefer HaYashar 9:13-19 (c. 1100 CE, Italy)

… Ethicist

Rabbi Yitzhak taught: Abraham may be compared to a person who is traveling from place to place when suddenly he saw a blazing palace. The traveler wondered: “Is it possible that this palace has no caretaker?” Then, the Caretaker of the palace appeared and said, “I am the Caretaker of this palace.” Similarly, did God say to Abraham: “Lech l’cha -- go forth…”

Bereshit Rabbah 39:1 (c. 400 CE, Land of Israel)

Maps of Grief

Yizkor Drash delivered at WRT on the morning of Shmini Atzeret, 5778.

Recently, I went drove out to the old cemetery in Queens where my great-grandparents -- whom I never met -- are buried. It’s one of those big, crowded cemeteries, where the burial plots are close together and the roads are narrow and winding. It had been several years since my last visit, and I wasn’t sure I remembered where to go. So I went into the cemetery office to ask for directions.

I told the clerk my great-grandparents’ names: Alexander and Jennie Reiser. She searched the cemetery database and said: “Died 1944 and 1968?” I told her that I did not remember. She smiled, and nodded reassuringly, as if to say, “Yes, but I remember.” She printed out a map of the grounds, and with a yellow highlighter drew a path through the cemetery’s maze of roads and plots. “Drive straight down Israel Street,” she said, “turn right on Matriarch’s Way, and there, just across Memorial Drive, they’ll be on your left. This is the way to your loved ones.”

If only it were this easy. If only there were a map, with clearly highlighted directions, that would bring us to our loved ones. If only we were gifted with the simple faith that someone or something more mysterious than the cemetery clerk holds an eternal record of the people who’ve come and gone before us. It’s easy enough to find a grave on a map. But once we’re there, how do we find the people whom we loved?

Helpfully, our tradition provides a map for this too -- a timeline of what to say and what to do. Step one: stay home for seven days. Cover the mirrors. Receive visitors. Step two: say kaddish for a month or a year, depending on who has died. Step three: at the end of one year, unveil a gravestone. Step four: light a Yahrzeit candle every year on the anniversary of death. Step five: visit and place a stone on your loved one’s grave.

This map of Jewish mourning is fairly simple. But where it leads, I cannot reliably say. It is intended to lead towards comfort and healing. But of course we know that even with the clearest of maps, a wanderer is liable to feel utterly lost.

Out there at the cemetery in Queens, even with a map in my hand, it is easy to feel lost. It’s a Sunday morning, and many parked cars line the one-lane roads. These roadblocks force me to venture from the clearly marked route on my map. I take a detour, thinking it will lead to my destination. But I am frustrated to discover that many of the roads in this cemetery are one-way only. Of course, this design is intended to help ease the flow of traffic, but I pause at the not-so-subtle reminder. Who better than a mourner understands that time moves in only one direction?

Kierkegaard wrote: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." We can’t go back in time and say that thing we wish we’d said, or unsay that thing we wish we hadn’t. We can’t hug people we never knew, like my great-grandparents, or be hugged one more time by people we knew and loved. Our map doesn’t lead backwards. It only allows us to look.

After turning down a few one-way roads, I arrive, circuitously, at a small family burial plot. Some names I know. Others sound like only echoes of the past. Who were Harold and Mimi Scheinberg? Who was Michael Berger? Even on the few gravestones whose names I recognize, there is so much left unexplained. She was “a beloved mother and sister.” But sister to whom? Where is her sister buried? Were they close? He was “born in 1881.” How old was he when he came to America? Whom did he leave behind in Europe?

Not finding these answers on my loved one’s gravestones, I turn from the cemetery map in my hand to the map of Jewish mourning that each of us carries in our mind. “Step five: place a stone on your loved one’s grave.” The Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read on Sukkot, teaches that “there is a time for every experience under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die… a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones” (3:1-5). Visiting the cemetery is the time for gathering stones. We search the cracks in the pavement and sift through the dirt looking for something solid -- a rock or a pebble -- something firm that won’t crumble dust. We do this, we are taught, because rocks, unlike flowers, never die. Our loved one may be gone, but our memory of them is enduring.

This ritual provides only a rather cold comfort. A stone, after all, has no life, no warmth of its own. When we say that a person has a “heart of stone,” it means that that person is unfeeling. And yet, at the cemetery, it is precisely feeling that we seek. The ritual of placing a stone requires us to reverse that familiar phrase: not to leave with a heart of stone, but rather, to leave a stone that is filled with heart. We gather stones and imbue them with that all our heart has to offer: all our yearning, all our love, all our regret, all our loneliness. Stones, we find, can carry the burden. They are strong, heavy, weighty -- like grief.

This is loss: a map that requires many detours, the disappointment of one-way streets, the cold comfort of stone. Our maps our insufficient. Our rituals do too little. And this is why we observe our Yizkor ritual. This is why we remember. Because it is only through memory that we can ever look backwards down a one way street. It is only through memory that we can give what is cold as stone the life and warmth of vitality of life. Memory is no map -- it has no clear pathways, no obvious grid, no step-by-step instructions. It is a messy business, cloudy with forgetfulness, inflated with legend, winding and curving, not straight. It is, by its very nature, full of detours.

And yet, our memory -- and also, we hope, our God -- are indeed something like that cemetery clerk. They hold an eternal record of the people we’ve loved and lost. All we must do is knock on the door and say, “I’m looking for someone.”

The Clean Plate Club

Westchester Reform Temple | Scarsdale, NY
Yom Kippur Afternoon 5778


I have a vivid memory of Ms. Burton -- the teacher at my elementary school who supervised the cafeteria at lunchtime. I am taking my Styrofoam lunch tray -- half-full of green beans and a partially eaten baked potato -- to the garbage. Ms. Burton stops me on the way. “I see that someone is giving up their membership to the clean plate club,” she says. I never knew I had been a member in the first place. “You know,” she continues, “there are children right here in this school who don’t have enough to eat.” I didn’t know that. But I shrug it off as I dump the Styrofoam tray into the garbage, skeptical that if I finished my baked potato, those hungry children would somehow be less hungry.

This afternoon’s Torah portion teaches that, despite my childhood doubts, Ms. Burton was right. There is a value in belonging to the clean plate club. But the Torah’s message is slightly more nuanced than Ms. Burton’s. Our Torah portion reads: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all way to the corners of your field. You shall leave the corners of your field for the poor and for the stranger” (Leviticus 19:9-10). Where Ms. Burton said “eat all that you take,” the Torah says “take only what you need.”

Our Torah portion is concerned with the equitable distribution of food -- as much a problem today as it was 2,500 years ago. Today, the world produces enough food to feed the entire planet one-and-a-half times over. And yet, 800 million people -- one out of every ten -- go hungry every day. On Yom Kippur, WRT responds to this problem by committing to restock the Food Bank of Westchester with 10,000 pounds of non-perishable goods. But even then, Jewish tradition impels us to ask if we have done enough. There is an entire tractate of the Mishnah -- an entire field of study in Jewish law -- devoted to this question. The Mishnah notices an ambiguity in this afternoon’s Torah reading: sure, we should leave the corner of our field for the poor, but how big is a corner? How do we know that we’ve done our part?

But the problem is deeper still. All of our food waste takes not only a human toll, but an environmental toll. On the production end, over-farming erodes the soil, wastes water, and destroys natural habitats. On the consumer end, food waste that lies rotting in landfills produces 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas.

We can be proud that WRT is engaged in addressing this problem. Our Zero Waste initiative ensures that all leftover food scraps are composted, rather than dumped. And we’ve taken hold of a new definition of the clean plate club, by eschewing all paper and Styrofoam products -- like the one from my elementary school cafeteria -- and instead using only compostables. Our Zero Waste initiative, established and led by congregants Ron Schulhof and Michelle Sterling, has become the preeminent model of sustainability in our area -- setting the example for other houses of worship, for local schools, and for the Scarsdale Village food-scraps program. In fact, Ron and Michelle, along with Rabbi Blake, will be presenting at the upcoming URJ Biennial -- the central gathering of 5,000 Reform Jews this December in Boston -- on how WRT became a Zero Waste synagogue, and what other Jewish communities can learn from our best practices.

We should be proud of all these achievements. And if you don’t yet participate in the Scarsdale food scraps program, it’s never too late to start. After all, this work is never finished. We must every day recommit ourselves to pursuing food justice and sustainable agriculture -- to leaving the corners of our field for the poor. Because when our tradition asks, “How big is a corner?” the answer comes back in no uncertain terms. Ein lahem shiur, it says. “There is no size limit.” Give as much as you can. Take only what you need. Or, as Ms. Burton would put it, “Don’t throw away that Styrofoam plate. Strive, in all ways, to be a member of the clean plate club.”

The Chosen People

Westchester Reform Temple | Scarsdale, NY

Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5778

Over the past year or so, a song by Harry Chapin has been stuck in my head. He wrote it more than forty years ago, but it feels as if it could have been written yesterday.

The song is called “[The Town That] Made America Famous.” It tells the story of a picturesque American town -- a shining city on a hill,[1] blessed by God and chosen for greatness: “We lived in the town that made America famous … six traffic lights, and seven cops, and all the streets kept clean, the supermarket and the drugstore and the bars all doing well.”

But of course, smoldering beneath the surface of the Town That Made America Famous, culture conflict burns. Neighbor distrusts neighbor. Factions form. Antagonism grows. By the song’s end, this culture conflict will literally set the town ablaze and threaten to fray the fabric of society beyond repair.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying that the fabric of our society may soon be at risk of fraying beyond repair. Neighbor distrusts neighbor. Antagonism has grown. This, despite my having grown up believing that there was something about America that made this country exceptional. I was taught that this was the greatest country on earth, that we had never lost a war. We were the envy of the world -- blessed by God and seemingly chosen for greatness.

But if I grew up believing in American exceptionalism, I believed equally in a similar idea: the idea that we Jews are God’s chosen people. Whether we recognize it or not, the feeling of chosenness pervades our Jewish lives. We read about it in the Torah.[2] We declare it in our prayers.[3] Even outside these religious settings, we feel chosen: our expectation of Jewish genius and our corresponding shame in Jewish scandal -- these are secular expressions of the core Jewish idea that somehow our people is destined for greatness.

In his book Chosen Peoples, sociologist Todd Gitlin argues that the feeling of chosenness lies at the core of both the American and the Jewish experience. Chosenness can be a blessing, a spark of hope in dark times. But, as Gitlin argues, it can easily become a burden -- a sometimes misguided feeling that the chosen group can do no wrong.

I worry. I worry about America. Not about our politics, but about the fabric of our society. I worry that there may be great risk in thinking of our country as chosen. And so, if we are to keep the America that we love so much from fraying beyond repair, we had better more clearly understand exactly what it is that made America exceptional in the first place -- or as Harry Chapin put it, what it is that made America famous. To help us, let us look to the original discussion of chosenness. Let us look to our Jewish tradition.

Scholars of biblical history believe that the idea of Jewish chosenness was born in the wake of tragedy.[4] In the year 586 BCE, the Babylonian empire conquered the tiny kingdom of Israel. Our capital in Jerusalem was destroyed, our holy Temple laid waste, our leaders sent into exile, and our faith in God’s protection shattered.

But in response to this tragedy, Judaism evolved. Our ancestors quickly realized that they could feel God’s presence not only in the safety of their own land, but anywhere -- both in times of triumph and in times of defeat. God had not abandoned them. Their hope was restored, and our chosenness was born.

Not only after the Babylonian Exile, but throughout the many dark chapters of Jewish history, our chosenness has been a source of hope -- a reminder that even in the worst of times, we remain under God’s care. Many tragedies would befall our people: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem; the Crusades; expulsions from France, England, Spain, and Portugal; the pogroms of Russia; the Nazi Holocaust. In these dark times, our chosenness was a warm flame that kept us alive -- a reassurance that this was not the end. Tevye puts it well in Fiddler on the Roof. “We are Your chosen people,” he quips. “But once in awhile, can’t You choose someone else?”

Our chosenness not only sustained us, it invigorated us. Our feeling of destiny drove us to make advances in every human endeavor -- in literature, philosophy, science, and the arts. We made a name for ourselves, worked to live up to our divinely ordained stature.

But all that striving for greatness can lead to the shadow-side of chosenness -- to the claim that Jews are somehow morally or intellectually superior to other people. This is a misunderstanding of chosenness. If anything, our biblical narrative goes out of its way to illustrate just how unmeritorious were our mythic forebears. It consistently portrays them as stubborn, stiff-necked, and short-sighted. Today, we may point to our people’s many achievements as evidence that we are chosen, but as Rabbi Shai Held reminds us, “Nowhere does the Bible congratulate Jews on how many Nobel prizes they have won.”

There is a recurring motif in Yiddish folklore of the imaginary town of Chelm -- a city of fools, where each person is more dimwitted than the next. Perhaps you’ve heard one such story -- for example: of the night that the people of Chelm noticed the moon reflected in a barrel of water and, thinking that the moon had fallen from the sky, quickly sealed the barrel and tried to sell the moon for profit. Novelist Michael Chabon asserts that the fools of Chelm serve a literary purpose, as a comic foil for the Jewish people -- a caricature intended to highlight the absurdity of thinking that Jews are gifted with a superior intellect. The fools of Chelm serve as a safety valve against Jewish triumphalism.

And it is a necessary safety valve, at that. Our feeling of chosenness can easily cause us to expect too much of ourselves. We have high rates of anxiety. We expect too much of our kids. From the time they can talk, we dream of their futures at Ivy League medical or law schools. Ask any teenager in this community and they’ll tell you: the pressure is immense. What’s more, an overly prideful view of our chosenness can easily become fodder for people with an anti-Semitic agenda. They see our drive as evidence, in their eyes, that Jews control the world or that Jews think they’re better than everybody else.

So we see that chosenness can work both for us and against us. In dark times, it gives us a reason to hope. But it can also easily become a dangerous tool for self-congratulation.

The same is true of American exceptionalism. Like Jewish chosenness, American exceptionalism was originally constructed as a symbol of hope. The idea dates back to the Puritans, who imagined these shores as a new Promised Land, chosen by God for them to fulfill their destiny. And despite the obvious atrocities that European settlers would commit on this continent, the theme persisted.

The specific term “American exceptionalism” wasn’t coined until the 20th century. Jay Lovestone, a leader of the American socialist movement, used the term to explain why communism had never taken root in this country. Unlike in Europe, where centuries of aristocratic rule had pushed the lower classes to embrace socialism, America promised upward mobility -- the American Dream. Socialism was supposed to have a universal appeal. America was the exception to that rule.

America offered economic hope. Counter to popular imagination, historians have demonstrated that, by and large, Jewish immigrants came to America not to flee religious persecution, but to find wealth. Among the Jews of Europe, only the poorest of the poor risked the journey. At the turn of the 20th century, nearly 40% of European Jewry made their living in business, medicine, or law. Among those who came to America, these professionals represented less than 5%.[5] Those who left, left because they had nothing. They came because America gave them hope. This was a chosen land, they believed, where the streets were paved with gold.

Hope in the American Dream runs so deep that it has, on occasion, inspired near-messianic fervor. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Stanford political economist Francis Fukuyama famously declared The End of History -- his belief that free-market capitalism signaled “the final form of human government,” the endpoint of evolution. It seemed that America was not the exception, but rather was becoming the rule. It would only be a matter of decades, Fukuyama hoped, before the American Dream would become a world-wide reality.

But decades passed. And hope began to run dry. Income inequality grew. Nation-building collapsed. And suddenly, the American Dream seemed to be no more than just a dream. And it is here that the shadow-side of American exceptionalism begins to show its face.

As the American Dream crumbled, a new explanation was needed for what makes America exceptional. To fill that void, a centuries-old nativism has reemerged from the depths of our national psyche. It started out small: an uptick in hate crimes; a swastika scrawled on a subway map. But as in Harry Chapin’s Town That Made America Famous, our culture conflict continued to smolder. In Portland, two train passengers stabbed to death for intervening against the verbal assault of a fellow rider in hijab. In Charlottesville, the chants of “go back to Africa” and “Jews will not replace us.”

The truth is, America’s founding myth as a new world blessed by God has always only been half the story. If anything, the feeling that America is chosen may be responsible for many of our country’s darkest moral stains. In a recent book, journalist Liel Leibovitz makes exactly this case. He links our feeling of being exceptional to our mistreatment of indigenous peoples, the atrocity of slavery, the persistence of racial violence, even our excessive consumption of natural resources. Leibovitz’s book begins with an epigraph from Abraham Lincoln. Like many American presidents, Lincoln believed that America was chosen. But unlike most presidents -- and keenly aware of our nation’s obvious flaws -- Lincoln, notably, only ever used the word “chosen” with a key modifier. “I shall be most happy indeed,” Lincoln wrote, “if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty -- and of this, [God’s] almost chosen people.”[6]

And so we see two parallel stories: of a Judaism and an America that declare themselves chosen. Their special status serves as a symbol of hope. But left unchecked, that special status easily shows its shadow-side. And so we must seek a new and different understanding of our chosenness -- one that acknowledges the moral complexity of claiming to be chosen while still allowing that idea to provide spiritual uplift.

To do so, we must uncover an important truth: Jews are not chosen -- Judaism is. There’s nothing morally or intellectually superior about the Jewish people. There is, however, something morally and intellectually insightful embedded in the tradition that our people carries. The same is true of America. America is special -- not Americans. Both of these systems, Judaism and America, have at their core a great idea, an idea so special that it gives these systems and the people who participate in them a sense of eternal, transcendent value.[7] Although these ideas are embedded in Judaism and in America, they are not, at day’s end, primarily about Judaism or America. They are universal ideas, of value to all humanity.

The great universal idea at core of Judaism is the concept of covenant. Covenant is one of those fancy religious words that is easy to say but difficult to understand. A helpful synonym is “agreement” or “partnership.” The Jewish people agrees to be partners with God in helping to advance the good in the world. While other ancient peoples believed that God was unconcerned with human actions, entirely detached from the universe, our ancestors insisted that God needs us. God is lonely, our tradition declares, and is in search of good people to help advance the good of all humanity. We, among others, have raised our hand for this task -- hoping, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, to serve “as a light unto the nations.”

Similarly, America has at its core a great universal idea. That idea is summed up in the opening line of the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal, and are endowed with certain unalienable rights. Notice the scope of Jefferson’s claim. He did not write that all American citizens are created equal, but rather, that all people are created equal -- regardless of their nationality. Paradoxically, the great idea at the core of this country is an idea that, by its very logic, must extend to all countries.

This is the paradox of chosenness: Judaism’s great idea -- that we are God’s partners in advancing the good -- and America’s great idea -- that all people are created equal -- these ideas are the property of all humankind. Yes, our traditions exemplify greatness -- but it is the greatness of all the world.

This paradox is embodied by the High Holy Days. We, the Jewish people, come together to a Jewish building on the Jewish new year to recite Jewish prayers in a Jewish language. And on these, the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, what are the prayers that we recite? When we review our list of shortcomings, what faults come to mind? Not once does the High Holiday prayerbook ask us to confess for not observing Shabbat, or not studying enough Torah, or eating non-kosher foods.[8] The High Holidays are entirely unconcerned with these specifically Jewish behaviors. Instead, we confess to having spoken unkindly, to having held a grudge, to having indulged our impulses. The holiest days on the Jewish calendar are a platform for improving not our Jewish selves, but our human selves. This is what makes Judaism great, this what gives us the claim to chosenness: that the great idea embodied by our tradition is the property of all humankind.

If so, then we who sit here tonight are doubly chosen: chosen by Judaism, and chosen by America. This does not make us doubly special, but rather, doubly responsible -- responsible to live our lives embodying the ideas that make Judaism and America great. We are not the chosen people. We are the people who choose[9] -- who choose to apply our great idea in service of all humankind. If we choose to do so, then we might truly be able to say that we live in the Town That Made America Famous.

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[1] Puritan leader John Winthrop aboard the Arabella in 1630: “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us” -- referencing Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). Three and a half centuries later, President Ronald Reagan, in his election eve address: “I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining ‘city on a hill,’ as were those long ago settlers.”

[2] See, for example, Exodus 19:5: “You shall be My treasured possession (segulah) from among all the peoples.”

[3] See, for example, Aleinu l’shabeich from the concluding prayers: “God has not made us like the nations of other lands, and has not positioned us like the other families of the earth, and did not make our portion like theirs, and has not made our destiny like that of the masses.”

[4] On the development of biblical monotheism and the “Mosaic distinction,” see: Magid, Shaul. American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Post-Ethnic Society. Indiana University Press, 2013, p. 83.

[5] Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter. Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 161.

[6] Attributed by Leibovitz to Abraham Lincoln, in an address to the New Jersey State Senate, February 21, 1861.

[7] For a similar argument, see Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: “what made America exceptional were its people’s habits and ideas” (February 2, 2017).

[8] As noted in Hoffman, Lawrence. Prayers of Awe: All the World -- Universalism, Particularism, and the High Holy Days. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2014, p. 24.

[9] For a lively debate on the use of this phrase, see Rachel Kohl Finegold and Nancy Fuchs Kreimer: http://shma.com/2015/02/the-choosing-people/ and http://shma.com/2015/02/the-call-of-the-not-so-wild/.