Wake Up, Mr. West

In the fall of my sophomore year of college, a really big concert by one of my favorite musicians was scheduled to come to campus. For weeks, there were posters all over the restaurants and bars, advertisements in the student newspaper, and a giant banner hanging in the quad building excitement about the concert. Everybody was talking about it. When tickets went on sale, they sold out in less than an hour. And luckily, among the people who were able to get a ticket was my sister’s best friend – and she asked me if I wanted to go.

The only little problem was that the concert was scheduled at the end of Yom Kippur, immediately after break-fast. Nevertheless, I really wanted to go: so when Yom Kippur services on campus came to an end, I quickly grabbed only the smallest bite to eat at the break-fast (a slice of challah and a sip of water), and made my way over to the basketball arena to go to the concert.

And in case you haven’t guessed it, the artist who was performing that night – the artist who, for the entire fall semester, had been all anyone could talk about, who I loved so much that I was ready to go to the concert while essentially still fasting, who had banners hung in his name all over the campus – was none other than Kanye West.

Over the past several weeks, Kanye – who now goes by the stage-name Ye – has once again been all that anyone can talk about, and has even had banners hung in his name. But this time, the banners are not because he’s playing a sold-out concert at the University of Florida. Rather, this time it is because Kanye has landed in the news for repeated public antisemitic statements and other hateful rhetoric.

For those who may not have followed these headlines, allow me to recount some of the contours of this news story.

Unfortunately, Kanye West has a proven track record of using hateful rhetoric – and not only against Jewish people. At a Paris fashion show a few weeks ago, he wore a jacket that he had designed bearing the phrase “White Lives Matter” – a phrase that, at the very least, is highly provocative, and at the very most, as the Anti Defamation League labels it, is an expression of white nationalism. Also this month, Kanye went on prominent podcast and made the false claim that George Floyd – whose death a jury found to have been a murder – had died not at the hands of the police, but rather, had died because of a drug overdose.

Over the past few weeks, Kanye has fanned the flames not just of racial hatred, but also of antisemitism. It began during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Their conversation touched on the Abraham Accords, the historic agreement that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. When Carlson asked Kanye what he thought of the Accords (an odd question to ask someone who is not an expert in geo-politics), Kanye said: “I think [Jared Kushner] was just out to make money.” (A leaked version of the full, unedited interview shows that Kanye made other, even more incendiary antisemitic comments, which were ultimately edited out of the final broadcast.)

A few days later, Kanye posted screenshots from his cell phone, evidently of a text message exchange he had had with another hip-hop star, Sean Combs. In the thread, Kanye writes to Combs: I’m going to “use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me” – harkening to the antisemitic trope that Jews work through secret-back channels or in some unseen global network to wield hidden influence over the world.

When Kanye posted this text message exchange on social media, it was deleted for having violated Instagram’s content policies. Kanye then took to Twitter, where he criticized Mark Zuckerberg. Kanye wrote: “Who do you think invented cancel culture?” – presumably implying that Mark Zuckerberg and other Jews like him control the media, and are able to censor anyone who doesn’t fit with our supposed agenda.

Soon thereafter, the whole incident culminated when Kanye again took to Twitter, where he declared to his 31 million Twitter followers that he was going to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” He continued by implying that today’s Jews are interlopers who, thousands of years ago, stole the label of “Jewish” from people of color, who are the true Jews. The rant concluded with Kanye writing that the Jews “​have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes [their] agenda.”

Troubling stuff.

This flurry of antisemitic activity quickly created waves. Kanye was soon dropped by several of the big-name brands that are his sponsors; the private K-12 school that he founded closed its doors “effective immediately;” and many celebrities who had formerly been Kanye’s associates quickly condemned his words and actions.

Unfortunately, Kanye’s actions created not only waves of condemnation, but also, waves of support. Two such instances stand out to me, although it is not entirely clear which of these is more troubling: the group that hung a giant banner over a Los Angeles freeway (like the banners that hung on my college campus advertising Kanye’s concert), but on this banner it said, “Kanye is right about the Jews,” and supporters stood by the sign making Nazi salutes at the cars that drove underneath.

Or, perhaps this is worse offense: a tweet published by the official account of the Republicans who sit on the House Judiciary Committee (a tweet that, admittedly, was published before Kanye’s antisemitic rants, but after he wore the White Lives Matter jacket – and, in any case, still hasn’t been taken down). The tweet reads: “Kanye. Elon. Trump” – linking the three controversial figures, and seemingly praising them as iconoclasts and heroes of free speech who will speak the truth, no matter the consequences.

Troubling stuff.

On two different occasions this past week, Cantor Robin, our religious school director (Laurence Holzman), and I discussed these news stories with the teenagers in our congregation. The conversations were broad and wide-ranging, approaching the story from a number of different angles. Many of these angles I have heard echoed in the wider public discourse.

There’s the question of free-speech: whether a social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter has the responsibility to delete potentially hateful rhetoric from its site, or whether doing so violates the digital user’s right to freedom of expression. It is worth noting that earlier this month, Kanye announced that he would be buying the social media platform Parler – a site whose motto is: “Parler is where free speech thrives,” and is known for having minimal content moderation. Perhaps most famously, it was on Parler that much of the January 6 insurrection was planned.

Another popular angle from which to approach the Kanye story is the question of mental health. Kanye has been public about the fact that he suffers from bipolar disorder – which, as he describes it, causes him to sometimes feel paranoid. Given the wide range of bombastic and sometimes confusing statements that Kanye has recently made, should we perhaps take a broader view of his mental stability, and have compassion on a person who seems to be struggling? And yet, in the same breath, we might ask: does our compassion for his mental state give Kanye a pass to say anything that crosses into his mind, without concern for consequence, without considering his enormous popular influence? Kanye himself says that it would be “dismissive” to assume that all of his provocative statements are merely a sign of mental unhealth – that, to some extent, he does mean the things that he says: that, even if he shouldn’t be taken literally, then at the very least, he should be taken seriously.

There is also the question of how we should engage with artists when we like their art but do not like their behavior. I loved Kanye when I was in college. I went to his concert on Yom Kippur after only barely breaking the fast. I can easily name seven of his albums. Is it kosher, so to speak, in the light of his most recent comments, for someone like me to still stream his music on Spotify – where, even if I’m not directly paying for his music, I am nevertheless increasing his listenership and further contributing to his popularity? What if I have a CD of his? (Which, by the way, I don’t; I don’t even own a CD player any more.) Is it kosher to listen to a Kanye CD in the privacy of my own home, where I am increasing neither his financial success nor his public popularity – or do I need to boycott his music completely?

These questions – on free-speech, on mental health, and on artists and their behavior – swirl around this story. In the news media, these seem to be the common themes that have been repeatedly lifted up.

But of course, there’s another important angle as well – one that hasn’t gotten quite as much attention: one that we discussed with our teens this week, and one that I’d urge all of us to grow more attuned to. We asked our teens: what exactly is it that makes Kanye’s comments about the Jewish people not just mean-spirited or ill-informed, but rather, specifically antisemitic? Put differently: what exactly is antisemitism? Are we able to describe what anti-Semitism looks like – so that when it happens, we can easily recognize it and call it out? In some cases (although clearly not in this one) a person might unknowingly traffic in dangerous antisemitic tropes. Can we help others to understand what antisemitism looks like – so that hopefully we can defuse the harm before it happens the next time?

Kanye’s three comments – that the Abraham Accords were just about Jared Kushner making money, that the Jewish people were pressuring Sean Combs through some secret back-channels, and that Mark Zuckerberg and the Jews created control the media and created cancel culture – illustrate precisely how antisemitism works. Antisemitism is unlike many forms of bigotry and hatred. Other forms of bigotry seek to suppress the hated group: to make us think that the hated group is subhuman, that they are less than us, that they are morally repugnant, hopeless bottom-feeders. Antisemitism does the exact opposite. It causes people to imagine not that Jews are a lower class, but rather, are somehow a superclass – that we’re the the one-percent, the evil forces at the top of banking, government, and the media, the puppet-masters fiendishly controlling the unwitting masses down below.

This is part of what makes anti-Semitism so hard to spot – why certain comments that are so obviously offensive to us Jews are sometimes overlooked by others who don’t recognize the hurt that has been done. It is because anti-Semitism functions in a different way from many other forms of bigotry. It is, we might say, a mirror image of other forms of bigotry: two sides of the same coin, that often work in tandem. One form of hatred reinforces the other.

While it is certainly important to discuss the many different angles of the Kanye story – free-speech, mental health, artists and their behavior – it is imperative that our focus on these issues not overshadow the antisemitic content at the core of this story. Antisemitism can be hard to spot. It is easy enough to recognize it when it escalates into a celebrity threatening to go "death con 3" on Jewish people, or escalates into group of people giving the Nazi salute over a highway in Los Angeles. But in order to prevent those kinds of actions – and, God forbid, much worse – we need to be able to describe, recognize, and prevent the subtler forms of antisemitism that are a mere slippery slope away from those more egregious demonstrations.

When the public discourse about Kanye focuses only on free-speech, or mental health, or artists and their behavior, we Jews have the responsibility point out what antisemitism looks like, and why it is a pattern that is sometimes all too easily overlooked. 

The Kanye concert that I went to during my sophomore year of college was part of a tour that he was doing, after he had released his second studio album. I have listened to that album more times than I can count. The very first song on the album opens by imagining a young Kanye West in school. He has fallen asleep in class, and is snoring as the teacher drones on. The teacher, recognizing Kanye’s drooping head at the back of the classroom, comes over to his desk and jolts him from his sleep – shouting, in the album’s memorable first lyrics: “Wake up, Mr. West!”

Today, we might say those very same words to him – and indeed, to ourselves, and to our entire society. If we are to root out hatred from our society, then we had better be able to describe what hatred looks like, even in its most subtle forms. The stakes are too high to be sleeping in class. It is time – as Kanye himself said on that memorable album – for all of us to wake up.

A Tale of Two Prophets

A teacher of mine used to say: Poetry is the art of leaning two words against each other, and then listening in on their conversation. I love this description. And I think it accurately describes the power of poetry. A classic example comes from Homer, who frequently uses the phrase “the wine-dark sea.” Listen to the conversation between those words: we may not have thought of it before, but the sea is indeed as dark as wine – and also is as tempting and as dangerous.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we have the opportunity to lean not two words against each other, but rather, two characters from the Hebrew Bible – two characters whose stories are, in many ways, remarkably similar, and in other ways, wildly different. The two characters that we might compare are: on the one hand, Abraham, in the story where he argue with God over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – and, on the other hand, Jonah, the protagonist of this afternoon’s haftarah reading, whom we might reasonably call the anti-hero of Yom Kippur.

In both stories, God approaches a Hebrew prophet in order to inform him of God’s plans to destroy a wicked city in which the prophet does not live. For Abraham, although he knows only one person in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – his estranged nephew, Lot – he nevertheless argues with God over the fate of his neighbors. Jonah, by contrast, seemingly could not care less about the strangers in distant Nineveh. His philosophy seems to be: not my town, not my problem.

But the contrasts do not end here. The two prophets also each have their own theory of justice. When Abraham hears of God’s plan, he asks God to reconsider – arguing that even if there are as few as ten innocent people in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God should not follow through with the punishment. Notice that Abraham does not ask God to save the ten innocent people, and meanwhile let all of the rest of the cities’ inhabitants die – but rather to save the entire population on account of the ten innocent people. Abraham seems to believe that righteousness is contagious – that even as few as ten good people can help to restore all of their fellow citizens to goodness.

While Abraham believes that human beings can always improve, Jonah, by contrast, believes that all human errors should be swiftly and thoroughly punished. When the people of Nineveh do at last change their evil ways, and God decides not to destroy the city, it aggrieves Jonah greatly. He complains to God, saying that he knew that God would relent – that this was why Jonah had initially been so reluctant to take up his task. He seems to believe that if punishments are not consistently and predictably enforced, that human beings will have no compelling reason to do the right thing in the first place. We might say that Abraham believes in restorative justice and rehabilitation, while Jonah believes in punitive justice, a platform of law and order.

There are many other striking differences between these two Hebrew prophets – but I will conclude by sharing just one. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is Abraham who rebukes God, saying: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?” – while in the story of Nineveh, it is God who rebukes Jonah, saying: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for. … Should I not care about Nineveh?”

This Yom Kippur, let us hope to be more like Abraham, and less like Jonah – concerned for our neighbors, even when we do not share their fate; believing that righteousness is contagious, that human beings can grow and change; among those who choose to rebuke the world, rather than those whom the world must rebuke.

Let us not be like Jonah, fleeing from his task, asleep in the belly of a cargo ship – as, meanwhile, the seas rage all around us. And as this holiday of Yom Kippur comes to an end, and we hear the final blast of the shofar, may we hear in that sound of the ram’s horn the words of the ship’s captain as he awakens Jonah from his slumber: “How can you be sleeping so soundly? Arise!”

The sea is raging. And only we can make it stop.

A Family Portrait

This Yom Kippur morning, I want to tell you about a recent family photograph that we took – or rather, I should say, a recent family photograph that we wanted to take, but it never wound up happening.

It was this past summer, while my family and I were on vacation at the beach. We had spent the past three days building sandcastles, riding boogie boards in the waves, drinking frozen lemonade in the sun, and making s’mores at night. Every day had been a delight. Now, it was the last morning of vacation – and while we were enjoying our final hours on the beach, we wanted to take a family picture, to help capture all of the happy memories.

And this was the moment that things began to unravel. Our kids – exhausted after four long and hot days in the sun, and three nights of staying up way past their usual bedtime – were simply too tired, too sandy, and too salty to cooperate. They told us that they did not want to take a picture. But the more that they refused, the more that I insisted – until, at last, what had begun as an enjoyable final morning on the beach quickly escalated into an all out argument, and the photo never happened.

We likely all have had an experience like this, in which we felt completely exasperated by someone that we love – whether that person was your child or your parent.

Our Jewish tradition has always been finely attuned to the friction that can arise in the parent-child relationship. The Book of Genesis is filled with agonizing stories in which parents and children butt heads with one another. We should consider these stories to be one of our tradition’s many merits – reflecting back to us, in an exaggerated way, the types of parent-child conflicts that we know to be possible in our own lives.

But among all of these stories, perhaps none of them better captures the friction of the parent-child relationship than the life of our founding patriarch: Avraham Avinu – Father Abraham. Abraham is not just the father of the family tree. It seems, rather, that fatherhood is one of his defining characteristics. His Hebrew name, Av-raham, can be translated to mean “excellent parent.”[1] As is the case with our own parents, we never have the chance to see him as a kid; Abraham first appears in the Jewish people’s story already as a fully formed adult. 

If there ever was a parent who had conflicts with his children, Abraham is it. His older son, Ishamel, he banished; and as we read last week on Rosh Hashanah, his younger son, Isaac, he nearly killed.

Now, it is Yom Kippur – ten days after the unhappy events that we read about on Rosh Hashanah. His wife, Sarah, has now died – and Ishmael is long since gone. Now it is only Abraham and Isaac: father and son, who have always butted heads, who have always driven each other a little bit crazy – for the rest of their lives, together and alone.

On Yom Kippur, we might wonder: how are things going for Abraham and Isaac? How are father and son getting along, in this complex relationship that – like so many of our relationships – is founded on love, and yet, so often full of discord and strife? And most importantly, we might wonder: can this holiday of Yom Kippur help to repair what has been broken between them?

***

Ever since Isaac was small, Abraham never quite knew how to relate to him. Could this kid really be the child of the great Abraham? Abraham, who heeded the call to adventure, and left behind the country of his birth in order to Lech Lecha – to go – to the land that God would show him; Abraham, who battled with kings and received gifts from pharaohs; Abraham, who took God to task over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; Abraham, who established ethical monotheism, whose insistence upon impeccable moral standards was matched only by his insistence that there is just one true God of the universe.

And then, there’s his son Isaac – shy, timid Isaac. He is seemingly always forlorn. He spends his days indoors, sulking in the darkened tent of his late mother, Sarah. On the rare occasion that he does go outside, it is not to go off on great adventures, as his father once did, but rather, to wander aimlessly in the field, quietly muttering to himself. His horizons are limited; of all the matriarchs and patriarchs, he is the only one who will never journey outside the Land of Canaan. He lacks all initiative, unable even to find a wife for himself; his father will need to do that for him. Abraham looks at Isaac and feels a pang of disappointment. How can this possibly be the child that he and Sarah had wanted for so long?

Perhaps some of us may have had parents who were like this – parents who put their painfully high expectations on us: parents who, nearly from the moment we were born, were grooming us for greatness, who expected that our homework would always be done and our grades would always be perfect; parents who expected that we would always be on our best behavior, who expected that our beds would always be made and that we would never track dirt into the house; parents who did not understand us, who looked at us and did not see who we were, but rather, only who they wanted us to be.

For those of us who are parents: even if we do not carry these kinds of exceedingly high expectations for our kids, we nevertheless all have certain hopes and wishes which, wittingly or not, we place upon our children. We want them to be happy, to have friends, to do well in school, to find hobbies that they enjoy, to find work that they love, to be able to provide for themselves, to find a partner who brings out the best in them, to become well-adjusted, thriving adults.

It pains us when these things do not happen for them. We do not want to see our kids having trouble making friends, struggling with perfectionism, forming relationships that are unhealthy, or worse, wrestling with substance abuse or addiction – even though we know that we cannot protect them entirely, even though we know that, regardless of our efforts, some of these things will indeed happen to them.

But here is the even more painful part. Deep down, we might recognize that not only can we not protect our kids – in fact, in many ways, the exact opposite is true. Some of the character traits and bad habits that we do not want for our children will befall them not despite us, but rather, because of us.

If I am being entirely honest about that day at the beach, the reason why the family photo never wound up happening is not only because my kids were being stubborn – but rather, because I know someone else who is also deeply stubborn; someone who, on far more significant occasions than a day at the beach, has refused to participate in a family photo; someone who, many more times than once, ruined the last day of a family vacation with his irritability, so that the parting memory of any particular trip became not the joy that had been shared, but rather, the trip’s tumultuous ending. And of course, that person is me.

Deep down, Abraham has a similar realization. He knows that when he looks at Isaac, he feels disappointed not only in his son, but also, in himself. Why is Isaac so timid? Because you, Abraham, scarred him for life when you nearly sacrificed him. Why does he never leave the Land of Canaan? Because you, Abraham, were always gone – always off on some grand adventure, crisscrossing the ancient near east: seemingly everywhere except for at home. Why does he lack all initiative? Because you, Abraham, were so certain of your God and your ethics that you left no room for him to make any decisions for himself. If Abraham is being honest, he knows, deep down, that – although his name, Av-raham, means “excellent parent” – he has been everything except for that.

This is a painful recognition. Our kids will get bruised by life, and we will have been part of the problem. For some of us, our children will inherit our shortcomings: we were anxious, so they became anxious. For others, our children’s shortcomings will develop in reaction to our own: we were hyper-responsible, so they rebelled and became irresponsible.

When we see these traits and habits in our kids, we are subconsciously reminded of the worst in ourselves. They got that behavior from us, just as we got it from our parent, who, in turn, got it from their parent – creating a hall of mirrors in which our disapproval and self-criticism are reflected back and forth endlessly between the generations. 

This is precisely what happens for Abraham. He sees Isaac’s shortcomings and is reminded of his own. A feeling of dread courses through him – more intense than anything he has ever felt while standing in the presence of kings or of God. A prophetic vision opens up before him, and in his mind’s eye he is able to gaze into the future, to look upon the generations, where he sees that, like him, his son Isaac will someday scar his children; that, like him, his grandson Jacob will someday scar his children; that, like him, even King David, more than a dozen generations hence, will someday scar his children; that Abraham’s legacy will be not only the establishment of ethical monotheism, but equally, the establishment of a sprawling and quarrelous extended family in which there will forever be conflicts between parents and children – and seated at the top of that enormous family tree will be him: Avraham Avinu, our Father. Abraham.

***

On Yom Kippur, we are called to take an honest look at ourselves. When Abraham does so, he knows that he has not lived up to his name. He has not been an Av-raham, an “excellent parent.” 

But thankfully for us, Abraham is not the only model of a parent that we find in our Jewish tradition. Especially on these High Holy Days, we draw our inspiration not from Father Abraham, but rather, from a different kind of parent – not from the flawed human parent with whom we might be able to identify, but rather, from a lofty example of a parent, towards which we might aspire. On these High Holy Days, we seek to emulate not Avraham Avinu, but rather, Avinu SheBaShamayim, our heavenly parent – or, as the name might be more familiar to us, the Avinu of Avinu Malkeinu: the ideal of a loving parent that we associate with God.

To help us understand what Yom Kippur is all about, we might imagine an encounter between these two parental figures – a meeting between Abraham, the flawed, human parent, and God, the idealized, loving parent.

***

Many years have passed since the last time that God and Abraham met. Abraham’s son Isaac is now fully grown, and has become a father himself. But seeing Isaac as a father has not brought Abraham joy. Rather, seeing Isaac now pass on to his children the very same shortcomings that Abraham once passed on to Isaac has only reignited his feelings of disapproval and self-criticism.

God sees Abraham’s anguish – and decides, one Yom Kippur morning, to go and pay Abraham a visit. God arrives at the encounter carrying a very large book. Embossed on the cover in gold letters is the book’s title, “The Book of Memories,” a book that Abraham has heard of, but has never actually seen before – the book that is described in our U-n’taneh Tokef prayer, where it says: v’tizkor kol hanishkachot, v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u-mei-eilav yikarei – “You, O God, remember all that we have forgotten. When you open the Book of Memories, it speaks for itself.”

God opens the cover and shows the book to Abraham. The pages are filled with family photographs.

Immediately, as if by reflex, Abraham breaks into a sweat. He knows where this is going. First, God flips to the photos of Isaac: a photo of him sulking in his mother’s darkened tent; a photo of him wandering aimlessly in the field, quietly muttering to himself; photo after photo where the backdrop is always the same, the Land of Canaan that Isaac was never brave enough to leave. Then, God flips to the photos of Abraham: a photo of him almost sacrificing his son on Mount Moriah; a photo of him lecturing his son about the certainty of ethics and of God; side-by-side photos where Abraham is off in far-away places, and meanwhile, his tent at home is empty.

Abraham begins to feel that terrible sensation of dread – the endless hall of mirrors filled with disapproval and self-criticism.

But then, God flips to another page, with different photos on it, photos that Abraham has never seen before: a photo of Isaac in his mother’s tent – not sulking in the dark, but rather, happily reading by the glow of candlelight, traveling in his imagination to worlds far beyond the places that Abraham has ever visited; a photo of Isaac wandering in the field – not aimless and quietly muttering, but rather, deep in meditation, entranced by nature, filled with wonder and delight by every glorious blade of grass; a photo of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac on the day that Isaac was born, enormous smiles on both parents’ faces, at last holding the child that they had hoped for all those years, a day of immense joy – a reminder of why they gave him the Hebrew name Yitzchak, a name that means “laughter.”

Opening the Book of Memories, Abraham begins to see Isaac in the way that God sees Isaac: not his disappointment of a son, a reminder of all his own shortcomings – but rather, a beautiful human being, a quiet and gentle soul, his own person.

On Yom Kippur, we are called to see the people in our lives the way that God sees them – not just our kids, but equally, our parents, our siblings, our partner, and all of the other people that we are hardest on. This does not mean ignoring all of the ways in which we find them to be difficult. Rather it means trying to see them more fully: seeing not only their challenging behaviors, but also, all of the good that is in them; seeing not only their flaws, but also, having compassion for all of the ways in which they are bruised and vulnerable; seeing not only the moments in which they drove us crazy, but also, all of the moments in which they were thriving and at their best. The Book of Memories contains them all.

This is what we mean when we call God Avinu: that we human beings are flawed, and make mistakes, and disappoint one another, and regularly fail to live up to our potential – but nevertheless, regardless of whether our human parents recognized it or not, we Jews affirm that there is good in every single person.

If Abraham can begin to see the good in Isaac, not only will he help his son to thrive, but also, he will free himself from the endless cycle of disapproval and self-criticism – and at last become the Av-raham, the “excellent parent,” that he always wanted to be. And if we can begin to see the people in our lives in the way that God sees them, then we will also begin to see ourselves in the way that God sees us: good, and flawed, and beautiful.

***

On Yom Kippur, we are called to take an honest look at ourselves, to open the Book of Memories – a photo album in which every moment of our lives is recorded and forever sealed behind the plastic laminate sleeves of time. And of course, we will see there all of the moments that we are least proud of, all of the photos that we wish we had not taken: our arguments, our stubbornness – and recognize in these shortcomings a family resemblance that runs across the generations.

But this is not all that we will see there. Yom Kippur is not a day for relentlessly beating ourselves up over all the things that we have done wrong. It is, rather, a day for transforming ourselves, a day for opening the Book of Memories and recalling all that we have forgotten – a day to be reminded of all of the good that is in us, and is in every single person.

When we open the Book of Memories, we will find there photos beyond number: photos of us, photos of our parents and of our children, photos of our ancestors both mythic and real, photos of the entire human family – a scrapbook overflowing with portraits of each and every human life. And if we are looking carefully, we will begin to recognize among the pages and pages of photos a certain family resemblance that is shared among us all: that each of us is good, and flawed, and human. And that will be a family portrait that is worth keeping.

__________

[1] Traditionally, Avraham is taken to mean “father of a multitude.” However, his original name is Avram – which can be broken into two parts: av (“father/parent”), and ram (which can be translated as “esteemed”).

Kafka’s Binding of Isaac

Of all the Jewish people’s many stories, perhaps none has more captured the world’s imagination than this morning’s Torah reading: the story of the Binding of Isaac.

We likely are familiar with the narrative. God instructs Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah, where he is to offer the boy up as a sacrifice. Abraham dutifully follows God’s command – and it is only at the very last moment that an angel of God intervenes, and instructs Abraham not to lay his hand upon the child.

For the past 2500 years or more during which this story has been told and retold, it has captured the imagination of countless philosophers, poets, artists, and scholars. For the ancient Rabbis, it became a story about the courage of Isaac – who, like themselves under the shadow of the Roman Empire, was willing to give his life as a martyr for the sake of his faith. For the early Church Fathers, it became a story that foretold the life of Jesus – where, according to their belief system, once again a father would be willing to part with his beloved son. For the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, it became a story about the terror that Israeli parents face as they send their children off to the army – aware that they may sending them to their deaths. For the contemporary Bible scholar Phyllis Trible, the story is a warning about the dangers of biblical patriarchy – where the victim is not only Isaac, but also his mother, Sarah, who watches from the margins as the horrifying scene unfolds, silenced and powerless.

But among all these and many other stirring interpretations, a particularly striking take on the Binding of Isaac comes to us from Franz Kafka – who was, of course, himself Jewish.

Kafka’s version of the narrative comes to us in the form of a short story called “The Judgment.” According to his diary, Kafka wrote the story in a single night – in one fitful sitting at his desk. The date of composition: September 23, 1912 – which, that year, was the night of Kol Nidre. We can almost imagine Kafka hearing the Binding of Isaac chanted aloud in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah morning the previous week, the terrible themes brewing inside of him over the course of the next ten days – until, on the night of Kol Nidre, his version of the story came boiling forth, unable any longer to be contained.

Like many things Kafka, the story is highly surreal. But also like many things Kafka, the story probes something deep about the human condition.

Kafka’s version of the story is told from the perspective of Isaac – who, in Kafka’s retelling, is cast as a young man named Georg. All his life, we are told, Georg had been a shy and meek person, lacking in all confidence. It is only recently, now that he has reached young adulthood, that Georg has started to come into his own – at last finding success in the family business, and becoming engaged to a young woman in town. One morning, feeling pleased about his new-found good fortune, Georg goes to visit his father. But immediately upon entering the old man’s darkened room, Georg’s confidence disappears. His father berates him – accusing him in a thundering voice of stealing money from the family business, of having not properly mourned his late mother, of slowly poisoning the father to death. And in the story’s climactic ending, Georg’s father proclaims that the punishment for these crimes shall be death by drowning. In Kafka’s surreal style, a violent wind stirs the room – which sweeps Georg out the door, across the street, to the town bridge, and over the railing, where he plummets to a watery death.

Through Kafka’s pen, the Binding of Isaac becomes a story about the existential conflict that arises between one generation and the next. At first, a child is dependent on its parents – as Georg had been for most of his life. Eventually, the child’s confidence grows – until, at last, like Georg, the child finds success both in business and in love. But at the very same moment that the child is becoming independent, the parent, by contrast, is aging and growing frail. The child, it seems, no longer needs the parent. The next generation replaces the previous one. And in Kafka’s retelling, the parent’s twisted defense is to kill off the child – as Abraham nearly does to Isaac.

In Kafka’s fever dream, we recognize the mortal angst of living and dying. We know that time only moves in one direction. We fear that those who come after us will soon forget us after we are gone – that the entirety of our existence will be silenced by oblivion.

This fear, our Torah reading reminds us, is a very real part of the human condition. But it is not the only part. Because although in Kafka’s story, the father does kill his child, our Torah story ends differently. “Do not lay your hand upon the child,” an angel of God cries out to Abraham.

As we read the Binding of Isaac, we acknowledge the angst of being mortal – but we also affirm the goodness of lives yet to come. Isaac has not come to replace his father. Rather, he has come, in part, so that through him, Abraham and Sarah might continue to live.

Our Crisis of Community

Like all the most important innovations in Jewish life, Rosh Hashanah was born of a crisis.

Here is how things unfolded. Our ancestors did not always celebrate our New Year in the fall. If we look in the Torah, we will find that the Israelites originally observed the New Year in the spring – seemingly a more obvious time to mark the beginning of the year, as the days grow longer and warmer, and the world seems full of potential. For the first 500 years of Jewish history, that was the structure of our calendar.

But then, a crisis occured. The Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judea, and the leaders of our people were taken captive to far away Babylon. And by the time they were allowed to return home again three generations later, they had adopted many elements of the Babylonian culture in which they had been living – bringing back with them to the Land of Israel the Babylonian language, Babylonian names for their children, and also, the Babylonian custom of celebrating the New Year in the fall. Rosh Hashanah as we know it was born.

Like our ancestors, we too have just experienced a crisis – the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. And while it is not yet fully over, many commentators have noted that, at least here in the United States, we seem to have reached a new stage of the pandemic. Last month, the CDC published a statement saying that the virus is “here to stay.” Accordingly, they also issued a new set of guidelines intended to widen our public health objectives – so that we are no longer focused only on minimizing the spread of the disease, but rather, are now focused also on how we as a society can learn to live with the disease.

Like our ancestors who returned home from captivity in Babylon, we, it seems, have now hopefully made it through the worst parts of this crisis. And just as they returned home with some of their cultural customs changed – most notably, moving the New Year to the fall – we too must now take stock of all the ways in which the pandemic has changed our world, so that we can begin the critical work of recovery.

One important piece of that project will be working together to recover from our crisis of community. Since the pandemic began, many of us have spent less time meeting up with friends at the local coffee shop, less time catching up with a neighbor at the oneg, less time getting to know the parents of the other kids with whom our children are in school. As a result, our communities have suffered widespread isolation and loneliness, a hidden pandemic of anxiety and depression, increased incidents of substance abuse and self-harm, and extreme political polarization. Before the pandemic, we depended on our communal spaces for our collective wellbeing: to help bring us joy, to help kids and adults alike make friends who feel like family, to help support us through tough times, to help us recognize that ours is not the only family where sometimes there is tension.

For the past two-and-a-half years, these critical social interactions have largely disappeared. If we are to help our society build back some of what we have lost, then now more than ever, we need to be in community.

Towards that end, synagogues, in particular, will have an important role to play. Among all the many types of communities that we might be a part of – say, for example, the PTA, or a hiking club, or a book group – the synagogue community has one thing that makes us unique. In a synagogue, we understand that community is not just good for us. Rather, here we believe that community is sacred.

***

For us Jews, community has always been at the center of who we are and what we do. Consider, for example, how we American Jews sometimes have trouble describing our Jewish identity. We say things like: “I feel really Jewish, but I am not at all religious,” or, “For me, it’s not about the religion, it’s just about the traditions and the values” – though we often struggle to articulate precisely what we mean by the distinction. Or, consider the statistics from the Pew Research Center, showing that one in four American Jews identify as “Jews of no religion” – a description that, when applied to any other religious group, would seem to be a contradiction in terms.

To help us make sense of this confusion, we might look to the 20th century Jewish thinker Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan was himself a student of the French thinker Émile Durkeim, the founder of the modern field of sociology. Durkheim demonstrated that religions don’t come from the top down, but rather, they form from the bottom up. In contrast to the traditional view of religion – where a divine being reveals a set of beliefs and practices to a prophet, who, in turn, articulates them to the people – Durkheim showed that, in fact, the exact opposite is true: that religions begin with the people. A group of individuals unites around a set of shared experiences, which develops into a set of shared hopes, fears, and aspirations, which, in turn, are expressed through the structures of organized religion.

Building on Durkheim, Kaplan made the case that Judaism is, first and foremost, a communal identity. Kaplan’s most famous book is called Judaism as a Civilization. In it, he argued that Judaism is much more than just a religion – but rather, as the title suggests, is a multifaceted civilization: the sum total of our languages, our literature, our history, our connection to specific places, our recipes, our humor, our social mores, our ethical principles, our taboos, our art, our calendar. Within this composite, certain elements express our most cherished ideals. We call these our “religion.” It is an extension of who we are, an outgrowth of the Jewish people.

We can find this idea expressed in our Torah narrative. The Exodus story, our foundational myth, begins not with a set of religious principles, but rather, with a group of people. At the beginning of the story, the Israelites are nothing more than a sprawling extended family – with a shared ancestor, a shared language, and the shared experience of enslavement. It is not until much later in the story, when they reach Mount Sinai, that they develop any sort of spiritual insight. Before they become a religion, they are first a community.

But why, we might ask ourselves, do we believe that community is sacred? When we can find community in the PTA or in a hiking club, what is it that makes the synagogue unique?

To help us answer this question, we might look to the contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han asks us to consider the process by which a flower blooms. It begins with a seed, which sprouts into roots, grows a stem, forms into a bud, until, at long last, the bud bursts forth into petals – at which point, we tend to say that the flower has fully blossomed. But even then, Han argues, the flower is not yet complete. There are aspects of the flower that are not fully realized until the flower is brought into relationship with something else. Can a flower see its own color? Can a flower smell its own fragrance? A flower is not fully complete, Han argues, until it is beheld by an Other.

So often, we go through our lives like a flower that has not been seen. If we are lucky, we have, on occasion, experienced moments in which we felt deeply seen: by a friend who listened, by a mentor who brought out the best in us, by a partner who loved us even with our faults, by a sibling who understood us deeply on account of knowing the long arc of our life’s story.

The 20th century Jewish thinker Martin Buber wrote about encounters such as these. Buber argued that when a person is fully seen, three things are momentarily transformed: the person who has been seen is transformed, on account of their beauty having been realized; the person who is seeing is transformed, for having experienced so rich an encounter; and as a result, for both people, the world is transformed, because they recognize that all things contain the potential for beauty. Or, as Buber would put it: when a person is fully seen, God is made present.

This idea, too, is expressed in our Torah narrative. When the Israelites finally do reach Mount Sinai – the moment in which they at last become a sacred community – their transformation occurs not because God reveals to them some set of dogmatic principles, not because God legislates for them some set of arcane rituals, but rather, because they and God enter into a relationship. God appears to the Israelites, and addresses them by name. God decides to enter their camp, to dwell among them, to travel with them wherever they will go – a relational partner, who sees and understands them deeply.

It is only when we are seen and understood that we can become fully human. This is why we Jews believe that community is sacred.

***

In order to help our society recover from the pandemic, we will need synagogues to remind us of this important principle. What should a synagogue do in order to fulfill this unique role? What would a congregation look like if we were to channel all our resources towards building sacred community?

It would mean, as is already the case here at Temple Beth Shalom, supporting a culture in which each person feels comfortable to come as you are – where we can bring our fullest, most authentic selves, where we can show up not only with our joys, but also with our doubts, our worries, our life challenges, and know that still we will be embraced, that our whole self is welcome here.

It would mean congregants showing up for other congregants at every stage of the life-cycle – delivering a home-cooked meal to a family that has just welcomed a new baby, cleaning up the dishes at the end of the shiva visiting hours, bringing those little battery-operated Shabbat candles to a fellow congregant who is in the hospital, making a tzedakah donation in honor of the recent Bat Mitzvah celebrant.

It would mean investing in reusable name tags for every congregant, to be worn at every synagogue gathering – because no one knows everybody; because everybody, on occasion, forgets a person’s name; and because every single person deserves to be known.

It would mean fewer lectures by guest speakers, and instead, more small group conversations – fewer gatherings with rows of chairs, and instead, more gatherings in one another’s living rooms.

It would mean, like we do here, that in our religious school, the first thing that our students learn is one another’s names – that our educators recognize that just as important as the curriculum is the person who is learning it.

It would mean building a culture where those of us who are parents don’t just drop our kids off at the synagogue, but rather, have our own compelling reason to want to come inside: to catch up with friends over bagels and coffee, for a conversation about parenting or about current events, and maybe even for our own Jewish learning.

It would mean that we can talk about hard things, that we are committed to staying in relationship with one another even when we disagree about a political or a social issue, that we can learn to listen to each other.

It would mean that we are not siloed by age cohort – but rather, like we do here, that our teenagers help to teach our children, that our seniors read stories to the kids in our pre-school, that, outside of our family, the synagogue can be the one place in our life where we have relationships with people who are not in our own life-stage.

It would mean that each person’s gifts and passions are a critical part of our recipe for success: that, as has long been the case in this community, artists in the congregation have their work displayed in the synagogue; that writers deliver remarks on Shabbat and holidays; that congregants with interesting ideas to share and interesting stories to tell lead the conversation at Torah Study; that whether your professional background is in finance or in interior design, we need your expertise; that if you have ever lived in Israel or if your family survived the Holocaust, we need to hear your story; that if you know how chant Torah or know how to blow the shofar, or even if you don’t but would like to learn how to do so, we need you on our bimah – because each of us is needed to make our community strong, because there is no Temple Beth Shalom apart from what each and every single one of us contributes to the life of our congregation. 

Building upon our strong history, we can do all of these things and more. Not all at once, not without hard work – and most importantly, not without each other. It is for this reason that we are launching two new committees this year: a Caring Committee, in which congregants will provide care for other congregants at all stages of the life-cycle, and a Family Engagement Committee, who will work towards strengthening a culture of belonging among families with school-aged children Please watch your email or reach out to our office for more information about how to get involved in either of these two efforts – and stay tuned, in the years to come, as we continue to build other initiatives aimed at strengthening our sacred community.

The American Revolutionary Patrick Henry famously said: “Give me liberty, or give me death.” And although his zeal for liberty helped pave the way for our democracy, it also had an unintended negative consequence. Ours is a country that hallows a person’s independence above all else – believing that we can go it alone, that we do not need anybody else.

But Judaism has long been a force for counterculture. Long before Patrick Henry spoke those familiar words, the Rabbis of the Talmud had their own memorable phrase about the topic. They wrote: o chavruta, o mituta – “Give me community, or give me death.”

Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to be the collective embodiment of that countercultural message. We need to remind the world that community is not just good for us; it is sacred. And it is how we will recover.

A Blessing for the Westchester Reform Temple Community

We've just offered our Mi SheBeirach prayer for healing. But in fact, there are many different kinds of Mi SheBeirach prayers. Mi SheBeirach is a type of prayer, which requests a blessing for the person on whose behalf it is said. Most famously, there is the Mi SheBeirach prayer for a person who is sick -- but there also is a Mi SheBeirach for someone who's just had an aliyah to the Torah, a Mi SheBeirach for a wedding couple before they enter the chuppah, and also, there is a Mi SheBeirach prayer for a synagogue community, asking for blessing for congregation. And it is this final kind of Mi SheBeirach which we'd like to offer now.

Would the congregation please rise.

***

Mi she-beirach avoteinu v’imoteinu -- Avraham, Yitzchak, v’Yaakov, Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, v’Leah -- Hu yivareich et ha-kahal ha-kodesh ha-zeh. 

 

May the One who blessed our ancestors -- Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah -- bless this sacred congregation of Westchester Reform Temple. 

God -- our ancestors had an insight, a glimmer of spiritual wisdom, which they passed down to their children, and their children’s children -- an insight which has, in turn, been passed down to us. Our ancestors taught: “Place these words which God has commanded you this day upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children. Inscribe them on the doorposts of our house, and on your gates.” 

God -- our ancestors recognized the sacred power of the doorpost: a place that is neither inside nor outside, a place that is in between, a place on the cusp -- the place of transition. Our Eternal God -- this holy congregation of Westchester Reform Temple stands now at the doorpost, in a moment of transition. Some of us are going out. Others among us are coming in. Still others, the majority, are not going any place in particular. But nevertheless, all of us -- whether we are in motion or standing still -- this entire community is in a moment of transition. 

A moment of transition can bring with it conflicting emotions. It is at once both a beginning and an ending. It is at once both exciting and unsettling. It is at once both full of new possibilities, and also, is full of loss.

Our ancestors recognized that in a moment such as this, when our hearts are pulled in so many different directions, we need something to ground us. And so, our ancestors instructed us to mount a mezuzah on every doorpost -- a powerful reminder of their belief that You, our loving God, go with us through all our moments of transition.

And so, we pray: mi shebeirach avoteinu v’imoteinu -- may the One who blessed our ancestors with wisdom go with us through this hour of change. Help us, our Eternal God, to navigate the complexities of transition. Help us make our goodbyes sincere and heartfelt. Help us open our arms and our hearts widely, to embrace all the unknowns that await us, full of potential. Help us to carry with us always the experiences we have shared -- the times we have celebrated together, mourned together, prayed together, learned together, witnessed together our children’s growth and change, recognized together the changes we’ve discovered in ourselves. Our God, in this moment of transition, help us feel Your loving presence, a presence that accompanies us everywhere -- and in so doing, help us hold fast to our belief that life, that greatest of all transitions, is worthwhile and beautiful.

Standing in this doorway, may we gently lift our hand up to our lips, softly place a kiss upon our finger, and with the wisdom of our ancestors, lovingly reach out and touch the doorframe -- that we may approach this hour of change full of sweetness, affection, and love.

Our God, help us make it so. And together, let us all say: Amen.

Temple Beth Shalom Passover Introduction Message

Dear Temple Beth Shalom, 

Hi! I’m Rabbi Daniel Reiser, and I am really excited to be joining your community this summer. Over the past several months, I have enjoyed meeting many TBS congregants, and I look forward to continuing to build relationships in the months and years that are to come. I also have really enjoyed getting to know Rabbi Schecter and Cantor Joseph, and am honored to be joining them as a clergy partner in this time of great transition for Temple Beth Shalom.

For the past six years, I have served as an associate rabbi at Westchester Reform Temple, in Scarsdale – and my wife, Leah, and I and our two kids have been living in White Plains. Our whole family is really excited to move to the Rivertowns area, and to become a part of the Temple Beth Shalom community.

This Friday and Saturday evening, Jews all over the world will gather around their dining room tables for seder. Sociologists say that the Passover seder is one of the most popular and widely observed customs in American Jewish life – and there’s a good reason why that’s the case. The seder is a combination of many of the best elements that Jewish life has to offer: we gather together with friends and family; our homes become a sacred space; we share a meal; we engage in good conversation; we ask questions; we tell stories – many of the elements that make Jewish life compelling and powerful, and cause seder night to be different from all other nights.

In the years that are to come, I look forward to sharing exactly these kinds of experiences with the Temple Beth Shalom community – not only around the seder table, but at all times of the year. I am excited to hear your stories, to explore together life’s big questions, to engage each other in meaningful conversation, to share in one another’s lives – and continue to build upon Temple Beth Shalom’s rich history as a community that is different from all other kinds of communities.

I am excited to do all of this and more together. I am looking forward to continuing to get to know one another soon – and until then, I wish you a chag sameach, a happy and a meaningful Passover. May it be different from all other nights.

Curiosity, Creativity, and Freedom

Please find the accompanying handout here.

Ukraine

My great-grandfather, Alexander Reiser, of blessed memory -- after whom my father is named -- was born in 1881 in the city Lviv in western Ukraine. According to an exhaustive family record, which traces our lineage all the way back to the 1700s, Alexander’s parents and grandparents were merchants in the lumber business. They traded and exported all across the Pale of Settlement wood that had been chopped down in the dense oak forests of western Ukraine.

Over the past few weeks and months, as the tension in Ukraine has escalated into all out war, my great-grandpa Alex has often been on mind. Even though I never met him, and even though I have never been there, I feel, on some deep level that I cannot fully explain, a connection to Ukraine -- and in particular to the city of Lviv.

Of course, there are many reasons to feel concerned about the war in Ukraine. Like so many others, I am appalled by Russia’s blatant disregard for the sovereignty of a neighboring nation. This unprovoked war represents not only a threat to Ukraine, not only a threat to the stability of Europe, not only a threat to NATO, but also, a threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Like so many others, I fear for the life of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has shown incredible leadership and bravery over these past few weeks -- and also fear for the lives of the Ukrainian fighters, whose resistance against the better-resourced Russian military has, at least so far, proven stronger than expected.

Like so many others, my heart breaks for the humanitarian crisis that has been unleashed -- with hundreds of innocent civilians killed, with estimates, as of Thursday evening, of more than a million people who have fled to neighboring countries, and a million more who are internally displaced, taking shelter in subway stations to avoid the bombardment of missiles. I urge the congregation to help provide humanitarian relief by donating toiletries, diapers, and first aid kits, which will be distributed through the AFYA foundation, and are being collected in bins outside the main entrance to WRT through this coming Wednesday.

But for us as Jews, our reasons for concern about the war in Ukraine are not only about geopolitics, not only about the humanitarian crisis -- but also, it is about our heritage. Even for those of us who do not trace our family’s lineage there -- as I do, with my great-grandpa Alex -- Ukraine matters deeply to the Jewish people.

On Wednesday, President Zelensky -- who is himself proudly Jewish -- recorded a video message addressed to the Jewish people of the world. In it, he reminded us that Russia’s attempt to erase Ukrainian history also, in part, erases Jewish history. Since the war began, missiles have fallen on the town of Uman, where the Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov is buried -- and which has become a pilgrimage site for hundreds of thousands of Jews every year, who come to pray at the tomb of the revered rabbi. Missiles have also damaged the Babi Yar Memorial Center in Kiev -- a memorial site dedicated to the unthinkable massacre that was perpetrated there during the Holocaust, in which, over the course of just two days, 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were dragged from their homes, shot dead, and thrown into a mass grave in a nearby ravine.

All across Ukraine, there are numberless places that matter to the Jewish people: whether it’s the pilgrimage site of Uman, the ravine of Babi Yar, the vibrant synagogues and community centers that serve the approximately 150,000 Jews living in Ukraine today -- or, the dense oak forests outside of Lviv, where, a 150 years ago, my great-grandfather Alex’s family earned their living.

To be sure, Jewish history in Ukraine has been decidedly stormy: darkened first by the Khmelnytsky Massacre in the 1650s; followed by centuries of Tsarist restrictions about where Jews could and could not live, and what professions Jews could and could not enter; forced military conscription, including for children; countless pogroms committed by our neighbors; accusations of blood libel (the medieval myth that Jews use Christian blood in order to make matzah) charged against us even as late as the 20th century; the mass shootings of the Holocaust (of which Babi Yar is just the most well-known example), carried out by Germans, but often assisted by local Ukrainians; the repressions of the Soviet era. The list of Jewish tragedies in Ukraine goes on and on and on.

And yet, despite these many tragedies, Jewish history Ukraine is also incredibly rich. The number of Jewish luminaries who were born or lived in what is now Ukraine is staggering: the Baal Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Sholom Aleichem, Shai Agnon, Ahad Ha’am, Chayim Nachman Bialik, Golda Meir, Natan Sharansky -- to name just the most well-known few. The Jews of Ukraine were impressively culturally productive. Together, they pioneered three major innovations in modern Jewish life -- without which, the Jewish world as we know it today would likely be unrecognizable: the Hasidic revolution, the flowering of Yiddish literature, and the Zionist movement.

What was it, we might ask, about the Jewish experience in Ukraine that, despite our people’s stormy history there, we nevertheless were able to be so culturally productive? Why is it that these three major innovations -- Hasidism, Yiddish literature, and Zionism -- all were born in Ukraine?

To help us answer this question, we need a crash course in modern Jewish history. It is a story that can be told in two contrasting parts: the Jewish experience in Western Europe (places like France, Germany, and Austria) contrasted with the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe (places like Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine).

Let us begin with Western Europe. For the Jews of Western Europe, the modern era begins with the French Revolution and its battlecry of liberté, égalité, fraternité -- or “liberty, equality, and brotherhood.” The centuries of inequality between the nobility and the peasants gave way to the ideals of the Enlightenment: the rights of citizenship, equal protection under the law, democracy. And as these ideals spread across Western Europe, the walls of the Jewish ghettos gradually came down. Our ancestors were emancipated and granted equal citizenship under the law.

But in exchange for their citizenship, the Jews of Western Europe were expected to participate in the majority culture of the nation. They needed to speak French, look French, and act French. Gone were the days in which one’s primary group association was with the Jewish community. Identifying as French, or German, or Austrian had to come first.

The Jews of Western Europe adapted accordingly. It was there that our own Reform Movement was born, out of a desire to make our worship services look and feel more like the Protestant services of our German neighbors -- with prayers in the vernacular, instrumental organ music, and mixed seating for women and men. It was there that modern Jewish philosophy flourished, with thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn and Martin Buber -- mirroring the esteemed German intellectual tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. For the Jews in Western Europe, emancipation created the need for them to fit in.

All of these developments stand in sharp contrast to the experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe. For them, the modern era begins not with the French Revolution and emancipation. Rather, for the Jews of Eastern Europe, the modern era begins with a historical moment that has resonances to today. It begins with the Russian annexation of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

As the Russian Empire expanded westward, it newly found itself with control over many ethnic minorities: including Poles, Lithuanias, Ukrainians -- and Jews. In an effort to organize this jumble of groups, the Empire relied on the medieval institution of social estates -- categorizing people into different groups, each with its own a differing set of rights and responsibilities. Unlike the Jews in the West, who, after being emancipated, had to minimize their Jewish group identity, the Jews in the East were moved in exactly the opposite direction -- and were now politically defined specifically as a group.

And it is this difference between West and East -- this sense of collective Jewish identity -- that caused the Jews of Ukraine to be so impressively culturally productive. Although their collective identity was forced upon them as a political status, it nevertheless led to our three major innovations in modern Jewish life: the Hasidic revolution, the flowering of Yiddish literature, and the Zionist movement.

Let us consider each of them in order. First: the Hasidic revolution. In the 1700s, Jewish life in Eastern Europe was in disarray. Under the burden of heavy taxes, the community did not have enough money to properly fund the yeshivas where rabbis would train and study. As a result, both the scholarship and the leadership abilities of the rabbis began to suffer -- and the community began to grow disillusioned with them.

And it was into this leadership crisis that the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was born. He developed revolutionary ideas about Jewish life. To him, it did not matter that the yeshivas were weak. He taught, instead, that prayer is more important than study, that the heart is more important than the mind, that joyful piety is more important than Talmudic erudition, that the simple Jewish commoner can be as close to God as the greatest learned sage. Unlike the religious Reformers in Western Europe, who had worked to make Judaism more closely resemble their Christian neighbors, the Baal Shem Tov in Ukraine worked to make Judaism more closely resemble the life of the everyday Jew. Hasidism attracted followers by the millions.

Second: the flowering of Yiddish literature. While the emancipated Jews in the West were learning to speak French and German, the unemancipated Jews in the East had no choice other than to more fully embrace their mother tongue -- the mamaloshen: Yiddish. They created a rich literary culture, teeming with Yiddish novels, short stories, poems, essays, newspapers, journals, stage plays, and songs -- with the Ukrainian port city of Odessa as its vibrant, beating heart.

Unlike the Jewish writers in the West, who composed serious, cerebral books of modern Jewish philosophy, the Yiddish writers in the East composed stories about the lives of everyday Jews: about Tevye the milkman and his daughters (written by the perhaps the most famous Ukrainian Jew, Sholom Aleichem), or a story about an incident of getting lost on the way to the train station, or about falling asleep in shul and accidentally missing the entirety of Rosh Hashanah. These were the stories of the people, written in the language of the people -- and they proved hugely popular.

Third: the Zionist movement. We tend to think of Theodore Herzl (who was from Western Europe) as the founder of the Zionist movement. But in fact, the vast majority of Zionist leaders and their followers came from Eastern Europe -- and many of them from Ukraine. Two of these Ukrainian Zionists were Leon Pinsker (who predated Herzl by 15 years, and to whom Herzl’s ideology is deeply indebted) and the Ukrainian Zionist Aham Ha’am.

Both Pinsker and Ahad Ha’am observed that the emancipation of Jews in the West had come with some negative side-effects. Pinsker pointed out that, even after they had been emancipated, Western Jews continued to face discrimination. True, they had been made citizens -- but they were second class citizens, at best. What’s more, the Jews had very little power over their own emancipation. They had to passively wait until the state decided that it was ready to emancipate them -- and they might be waiting for a very long time. In his influential pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation, Pinsker called upon the Jews of Eastern Europe to stop passively waiting, take matters into their own hands, and establish a Jewish national movement.

Ahad Ha’am, for his part, also saw the negative side-effects of emancipation -- but from a different angle. He pointed out that emancipation also led to assimilation. As an antidote to this problem, Ahad Ha’am created the idea of Cultural Zionism -- the notion that the Jews should re-establish a Hebrew civilization in the land of Israel, from which a rich Jewish culture and a thick sense of Jewish pride would flow outwards to the Diaspora.

All three of these innovations -- Hasidism, Yiddish literature, and Zionism -- were pioneered in Ukraine. All three of them reflect the political status of the Jews of Eastern Europe -- who, unlike their Western counterparts, were not emancipated until the 20th century. On account of this, all three innovations are expressions of collective Jewish identity: the feeling that to be Jewish is, first and foremost, to be part of a group -- Hasidism, as the religion of the people; Yiddish literature, as the language and stories of the people; and Zionism, as the national movement of the people.

This is why the Jews of Ukraine were so impressively culturally productive: they understood themselves as belonging to a people -- a sprawling extended family. 

***

In every nuclear family, in yours as well as mine, there are certain places that we hold dear: the town in which we were raised, the beaches on which we have vacationed, the park where we proposed to our spouse, the cemetery where our parent is buried. These places are full of memories. These places have shaped who we are.

Even though I have never been there, and even though I never met him -- the dense oak forests of Western Ukraine, in which my great-grandfather Alex’s family earned their living, shaped my family’s story. The place will always be a part of us, and we will always be a part of it.

And what is true for our nuclear families is also true for the sprawling extended family that is the Jewish people. Even for those of us who do not trace our lineage to Ukraine, still it is a place that we cherish. It is a place that shaped the Jewish story. It is a place that produced our culture.

We Jews will forever care about Ukraine -- for there, we have known that to be Jewish is to belong to a group. To be Jewish is to be a part of a family.

The People of the Book

While I was in rabbinical school, I served as a student intern at Temple Shaaray Tefila on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. During my time with the congregation, the senior rabbi of the synagogue was Rabbi Jonathan Stein -- who, by that point in his rabbinate, had enjoyed a long and distinguished career. All four walls of his large office were lined with built-in bookcases, and every bookcase was packed from floor to ceiling with books -- some of them in rows that were two books deep. There must have been thousands of books in that office. When congregants -- or, in my case, a young rabbinical student -- would come into Rabbi Stein’s office and look around in wonder at his impressive library, the distinguished rabbi, with his usual wit and humor, would gesture towards the books and say: “I’ve read every single title.” 

A few weeks ago, the Jewish Book Council announced the 2021 winners of the National Jewish Book Awards -- their annual prize for the most notable Jewish books from the past year. And in the weeks since the list of award-winners was published, like Rabbi Stein, I can proudly say: “I’ve read every single title.”

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t read every book -- only the titles. And I must say, even just the titles fascinate me. Among the honorees are titles such as Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, a book that explores the deep religious meaning that American Jews have found in seemingly mundane experiences, like going to a deli. Another title is Becoming a Soulful Parent, a book that applies the tools of Jewish spirituality to the challenges of raising children. Another book is entitled An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Fam­i­ly, which is a novel that imagines a fictional visit by Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of the former Israeli Prime Minister) to the campus of a small liberal arts college in the United States -- an encounter between Israeli Jewishness and American Jewishness. And of course, there was an award for the writer Dara Horn’s much acclaimed and much discussed book on anti-Semitism -- which, in addition to winning a National Jewish Book Award, would likely also win an award for the most provocative title of the year. The book is called People Love Dead Jews.

Browsing through the list of winners is like browsing through Rabbi Stein’s library. While it may be true that, at this point, “I’ve read every single title” (and no more than that), nevertheless, reading every title makes me want to read every book.

Throughout our history, the Jewish people have always been lovers of books. One of our most famous and proud nicknames is that we are “the People of the Book.” We Jews love to read, love to write, love to explore new ideas -- love to utilize the power of language to transform our minds, our souls, and our world.

It’s been said that when you enter any sacred space, like a church, a mosque, or a synagogue, you will find at the front and center of the room the image or symbol that that particular faith group holds most dear. For the Jewish people, the symbol that we hold most dear is not a shrine or an altar, not a statue of a person, not some dogmatic statement of faith, but rather, is a book -- our Torah scroll. We love this book so much that we treat it with the utmost reverence. We stand up when we are in its presence, as if it were an honored guest. We try never to let it touch the floor, as if it were too exalted for so lowly a stature. We cradle it in our arms, parade it around the room, and lovingly kiss our finger when we reach out to touch it, as if it were a baby entrusted to our care -- a precious child, our hope for the future.

Our nickname “the People of the Book” originally comes from the Islamic world. In the early Muslim caliphates, although Jews did not practice the majority religion, still, our ancestors were granted a special political status. On account of our shared reverence for the stories of the Bible, our Muslim neighbors treated our ancestors kindly and fairly: granting them, in Arabic, dhimmi status -- that is, the equal protection that Sharia law extends to non-Muslims who are, nevertheless, “People of the Book.”

And indeed, in places where Jews lived among a majority Muslim society, our ancestors thrived. In Baghdad, in Muslim Spain, in Iran, and in Egypt, we Jews enjoyed prolific Golden Eras -- many centuries of literary productivity, generating some of the greatest Jewish writers and books of all time. The philosopher Maimonides, the poet Yehuda HaLevi, the Jewish legal scholar Joseph Karo, the mystical book of the Zohar, and countless others were all written by Jews in Muslim lands. Perhaps our most famous book, the Babylonian Talmud -- which, unlike the Hebrew Bible, is not a book that we share with other faith traditions, but rather, is exclusively a part of the Jewish religious canon -- the Talmud was written in Iraq. For Jews in Muslim lands, the term “the People of the Book” signified more than just a protected political status. It was our shining legacy.

However, as you browse through the titles of the National Jewish Book Award winners, it quickly becomes clear that the term “the People of the Book” is at least partly inaccurate. Among the twenty titles that received awards, only one of them is explicitly about the book -- the Torah. The other nineteen award-winners are on all kinds of secular Jewish topics, representing many different genres of literature -- including biographies, academia, cookbooks, personal memoirs, history books, and illustrated children’s books. The vast majority are not explicitly religious.

I imagine that the same might be said about each of our own Jewish book collections at home. While we likely might have a copy of the Hebrew Bible, the prayer book, and the Passover Haggadah, it is also likely that alongside these religious books, we might have a novel by Philip Roth or Geraldine Brooks, books about Israel or the Holocaust, books about the Jewish contributions to Hollywood and Broadway, a book of Jewish jokes or familiar Yiddish phrases, or perhaps books that are indeed inspirational but are not explicitly religious in content, like the well-known Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul. In our house, popular children’s books like Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins and Latkes, Latkes, Good to Eat are at least as beloved as the actual story of Chanukah. Judging either by the National Jewish Book Award winners or by our own personal libraries, we might reasonably say we Jews are not so much “the People of the Book,” but perhaps more accurately, “the People of the Books.”

Even “the Book” itself (the Hebrew Bible) is in fact not one single book, but rather, is a collection of books -- written at a variety of different times, in a variety of different places, by a variety of different authors, with a variety of different worldviews and motivations, spanning a variety of different genres. Some books of the bible may have been written as early as 1000 BCE; others, not until 200 BCE. Some were written in the Land of Israel; others, in faraway Persia. Some are books that are filled with religious piety; others are books of poetry (like the Book of Psalms), or a novella (like the Book of Ruth), or a collection of aphorisms, similar to Bartlett’s Quotations (like the Book of Proverbs). There is even a comedic farce (like the Book of Esther)!

What we now refer to as “the Book” is, in fact, a collection of books, spanning a variety of genres. If we look back into Jewish history, we will see that there has not always been perfect consensus as to which books should be included in the collection, and which books should be left out. There are many ancient Jewish books that did not make it into the Bible’s final cut: for instance, the Book of Jubilees, or the Book of Maccabees, or the Book of Ben Sira. Somewhere along the way, by some process that isn’t precisely understood by historians, our ancestors made a decision about which books to include in the Biblical canon and which to disregard -- sort of like an ancient version of today’s Jewish Book Council, deciding which books should be recognized with a National Jewish Book Award, and which should not.

There’s a famous debate that is recorded in the Mishnah, [1] in which the ancient Rabbis are arguing over whether certain books of the Bible possess the gravitas to truly be considered sacred. The debate centers around two books in particular: the Song of Songs, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. The Song of Songs, for its part, is a collection of ancient Hebrew love letters. It describes in vivid, sensual detail the courtship between two young lovers. In some passages, it could reasonably be described as erotica. It is hardly a wonder that the ancient Rabbis were divided over whether such a book ought to be considered sacred.

The other book that the Rabbis debate is the Book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes, for its part, is a philosophical treatise that expresses a skeptical view of human existence. It argues that life is meaningless, that piety is useless, and that justice is merely an illusion. And yet, despite the seemingly secular and potentially subversive content of both the Song of Songs and the Book of Ecclesiastes, the ancient Rabbis ultimately decided that both of them were fit to be called sacred -- and today, we treat both books with the same reverence that we would afford any other part of the Hebrew Bible.

Let us consider, for a moment, what this debate among the ancient Rabbis was all about -- and why it matters for us today. On some level, the Rabbis were asking: What are the books that we should care about? What content should a Jewish person read and study in order to be considered a well-educated Jew? [2] Do the books need to be explicitly religious -- or is there a meaningful place for other kinds of Jewish writing? Put differently: Should we define ourselves narrowly as “the People of the Book,” or more broadly as “the People of the Books”?

If we are to take the broader definition -- that there is indeed a meaningful place not only for religious books, but also for other kinds of Jewish writing -- then a whole new set of questions emerges. For example: to what extent should a person who is well-read in secular Jewish texts be familiar with and conversant in the classical religious canon? Should there be some sort of “core curriculum” of, say, Hebrew bible, prayer book, and Talmud that is required before a person can branch out into more wide-ranging “elective” Jewish reading, like fiction, history, and memoir? Additionally, we might ask: What are the limits to the term “the People of the Book”? Is it sufficient for a Jew to be well-read in general -- say, as an avid-reader of The New Yorker, or in the best of contemporary non-fiction -- but have never picked up the Book of Genesis or the Passover Haggadah?

In short, the question we are asking is: What exactly do we mean when we say that we are “the People of the Book” -- and even more importantly, how should that nickname inform our Jewish lives?

I ask these questions this evening without offering any definitive answers -- and I would welcome the conversation that these questions might lead to. But for now, I’ll leave us with the following thought, attributed to the medieval Jewish sage Hai Gaon. Hai Gaon lived in what is present-day Iraq -- where, as a Jew in a majority Muslim culture, he was granted equal protection under the law as one of “the People of the Book.” Fittingly, although he wrote hundreds of published works, not a single one was a book. Rather, he is best known for having written many letters, which we continue to study to this day.

Hai Gaon wrote: “There are three things that a person should hold dear: a field, a friend, and a book.” A field allows a person to earn a living. A friend provides a person with companionship. “But a book is even better than a friend. For a book can provide companionship as well. And while a friend might desert you, a book will go with you anywhere. A book can reach across time and space, and express eternal ideas -- and in that way, a book can become transcendent.” 

And isn’t this part of what it means to be Jewish: to treat that which is transcendent as if it were our closest friend? Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that we are “the People of the Book” -- not just that we a people who loves to read and write, but more importantly, that we are a people who believe that even when we feel alone, even when we feel that all seems lost and senseless, we nevertheless can always reach for a book and find there waiting for us exactly the thing that we need: guidance, wisdom, inspiration, companionship, the lofty ideals that we most associate with God. For us, a book is like the divine: a loving friend, eternally present, just waiting to be opened.

_____

[1] Yadayim 3:5

[2] For more on this question, see: (1) Moment Magazine’s symposium The Five Books Project, and (2) Hannah Pressman’s essay in The New Jewish Canon (2020, ed. Kurtzer and Sufrin) on Telushkin, Hyman, and Ochs.

After Colleyville

What a week this has been.

Last Saturday morning, on Shabbat, while the members of Congregation Beth Israel of Colleyville, Texas, were celebrating a Bar Mitzvah service, a stranger, who had come into the synagogue from the cold, seemingly looking for some place in which to sit and warm himself with a hot cup of tea, suddenly pulled out a firearm in the middle of the service, and demanded, at gunpoint, that these Jews, whom he imagined to be the world’s puppet masters, secure the release of Aafia Siddiqui from federal prison -- holding the rabbi and three congregants hostage in their own sanctuary for more than eleven hours. It was a terrifying situation.

Late Saturday night, after the hostages eventually escaped unharmed, we all breathed a deep sigh of relief. But still, that night, I could not sleep. It all hit just a little too close to home. I could not stop thinking about the scene inside that sanctuary -- about the tension, the pressure, the fear. I could not stop thinking about the assailant, who reportedly asked the hostages how many kids each of them had, and shouted to the hostage negotiator outside the door: “Why are you going to leave seven children orphaned?” I could not stop thinking about the congregants of Beth Israel, who watched as their little shul, where they have eulogized their parents and given Hebrew names to their children, was broadcast on international television, surrounded by hundreds of FBI agents and SWAT teams. I could not stop thinking about the hostages’ families. Who had informed them of what was unfolding inside of the synagogue? Where were they throughout the ordeal, and who was with them? I could not stop thinking about the hostages themselves. What thoughts must have been racing through their head?

I share these painful images not as an act of voyeurism, but rather, because they haunt me. And I know that I am not alone in this feeling. For many of us, it has been all too easy this week to project ourselves into that terrifying situation -- to feel that it could have been us, to wonder how we would have reacted. Although the hostages escaped physically unharmed, the events of this past weekend have once again activated one of the Jewish people’s most deep-seated psychological traumas: our centuries-old fear for our safety in an all too often hostile world.

Earlier this week, a group of congregants gathered together and studied a passage from the biblical Book of Lamentations about being held hostage. Lamentations was written more than 2500 years ago -- so deeply rooted in history is our trauma. The passage from Lamentations argues that among all the possible crises that might befall a person, to be held hostage is among the worst -- because to be held hostage inflicts not only physical pain, but also psychological, emotional, and spiritual pain as well.

In the days since the hostages escaped, there has been much conversation in the Jewish world about how to protect our communities from physical pain. There will be continued security training for clergy and congregants; there will be increased funding for synagogues and other Jewish institutions to secure our campuses; there will be vital conversations about how to strike a proper balance between, on the one hand, welcoming strangers in from cold, and on the other hand, keeping our communities safe from strangers who would do us harm; there will be further efforts to educate our friends and neighbors about what anti-Semitism looks like, why it is sometimes hard to spot, and how best to combat it.

These conversations about how to keep our communities physically safe are critically important. And yet, as the passage from Lamentations reminds us, our physical safety is only part of the equation. If we are to effectively cope with our deep-seated trauma, then we must also be sure to invest in our emotional and spiritual wellbeing -- which is why we gather together on Shabbat. We need each other right now. We need to be together, to hold one another. We need a space into which we can bring our pain, our fear, our sadness, our anxiety. We need to consider not only how we will protect ourselves when the world outside feels vulnerable, but also, how we will uplift ourselves when the world inside feels vulnerable. As one congregant put it so eloquently this week: we may need to carefully guard the doors of the synagogue -- but the doors of the ark must continue to remain wide open, so that we can pour out our hearts. 

This Shabbat, we are invited to do exactly that. With the ark wide open behind me, and our hearts wide open as well, we kindle these lights for Shabbat…