Simchat Torah Story Slam

The Jewish people are a storytelling people. 

At WRT's Simchat Torah Story Slam, we will unroll our Torah scroll -- and hear true stories told live by congregants (in the style of The Moth). We will experience the power of stories not only to entertain, but also to connect people to one another, to bring ideas to life, and to move us. 

Featuring stories told by WRT's own Vicki Assa, Andrew Pollack, Annie Radin, Mimi Rocah, Jeff Simon, Sheryl Spivak-Braun, & Josh Sussberg. 

Sunday, October 20, 2019, 7pm @ WRT

RSVP here: http://evite.me/wrtstoryslam

Hosted by Rabbi Daniel Reiser

Directed by Erika Radin

Organized by Bonni Bleustein and Rochelle Waldman

Wild Things

“On the night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ -- and Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ So he was sent to bed without eating anything.”

So begins Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, Where the Wild Things Are -- one of my and my kids’ favorites. If you go to the library, you will find it shelved among the children’s books. But like any great children’s book, it captures the imagination not only of kids, but also of the adults who read it to them.

Joseph Campbell, the famous scholar of mythology, once described Where the Wild Things Are as one of humanity’s greatest works of literature. The story fits the archetypal hero’s journey -- that literary motif where a character sets out on an adventure, overcomes some obstacle along the way, and returns home transformed.

Max, the hero of our story, does exactly that. He steps into his own private boat and sails in and out of weeks to become king of all wild things. And when he returns home, he has learned an important lesson -- about facing his wild side, about befriending his anger, about mastering those parts of himself that seem most dark and terrible.

On Yom Kippur, we, like Max, must also set out on a hero’s journey. We step into the private boat of our conscience, and sail in and out of the weeks of the past year. We examine our deeds. We consider our flaws. And like Max, we commit ourselves to mastering our own wild things.

And while there is much we can learn from Max about our task on Yom Kippur, it is only half of the picture. Because there is another message about this holy day hidden within the pages of Where the Wild Things Are -- a deeper message, that captures an important truth about Yom Kippur. And that deeper, hidden message comes to the surface when we read Where the Wild Things Are alongside a different, but parallel story -- a story from our Jewish tradition.

Our sages say that on Yom Kippur, we are reenacting the story of the golden calf. It is, after all, a story of wrongdoing and repentance, a story of transgression and atonement. Like Where the Wild Things Are, the story of the golden calf is all about making mischief of one kind and another -- and then about making amends.

This evening, let us put these two stories into conversation with one another. Let us read Where the Wild Things Are alongside the story of the golden calf, in order to discover the deeper, hidden meaning of Yom Kippur -- what this holiday asks of the child inside of us, and what it asks of the adults we have become.

*** 

Let us begin with the straight-forward meaning of Yom Kippur.

Our sages say that the Israelites who built the golden calf were like children testing their parents’ boundaries. To refresh our memory: the Israelites are encamped at the base of Mount Sinai, where they’ve just received the Ten Commandments. And although one of those commandments clearly states that they are not to worship statues, they go ahead and do exactly that, when Moses is not looking. They build a statue of a golden calf, around which they gather in frenzied revelry. They eat and drink and sing and dance around the statue, like Max and his wild things swinging from the vines and howling at the moon -- a wild rumpus at the base of Mount Sinai.

And although the Israelites have clearly broken the rules, our sages view them with sympathy. Some sages say that they acted like children, for whom it is only natural to explore what is off limits. Others say that the blame lies with Moses, who should not have left them unsupervised.

But despite these varied explanations, there is one thing on which all of our sages agree: the Israelites were acting on the basis of their Yetzer HaRa. In the Jewish imagination, the Yetzer HaRa is a character trait that is inherent in all humans. It is our primal, aggressive inclination. It is the chaotic force within each of us that, when left unchecked, can lead us towards destructive behaviors. Other fields of study also recognize this attribute of the human psyche. Freud called it the id. Evolutionary psychologists call it our reptile brain. Maurice Sendak called it our wild things.

Call it what you will, each of us has a Yetzer HaRa. In our evolutionary history, the Yetzer HaRa was a sustaining force. Our aggressive inclination allowed us to fend off predators, to maintain our territory, to procreate. But as human society became ever more complex, our safety and prosperity began to depend more on our shared social structures and less on our individual aggressive inclination.

Having lost its immediate usefulness, our Yetzer HaRa finds other, destructive outlets through which to express itself. It causes us to lust after things we cannot have, to commit acts of violence, to exploit others in pursuit of our own success. We are not proud of these character traits -- but nevertheless, they are real. Every now and then, when we are not being careful, they slip out in our behavior, or flash in the back of our mind. They roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws.

But despite the unsavoriness of our aggressive inclination, Jewish tradition recognizes that it is not all bad. If we can harness its chaotic energy, give it some meaningful direction, our aggressive inclination can be made productive. Our sages say that without the Yetzer HaRa, no person would ever build a house, engage in commerce, or have children. Like Max, we must learn to befriend our Yetzer HaRa, so that we have power over it, and it not have power over us. 

This may be the straight-forward meaning of Yom Kippur. But we have yet to uncover the deeper, hidden meaning of this holy day. If we are not paying careful attention, then we are likely not to notice that, besides Max, Where the Wild Things Are has a second protagonist, who goes on a hero’s journey of her own: Max’s mom -- whose voice we hear only once, and whose face we never see. And it is from this hidden character that we can learn the deeper, hidden meaning of Yom Kippur. 

This, then, is where her hero’s journey begins:

“On the night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another,” he pushed every single one of his mother’s buttons, until she was at her wit’s end. She tried to stay calm, to reason with Max. But the more she tried, the more he pushed -- and the more the situation escalated. Her patience waned, her irritation grew -- until finally, in a fit of frustration, she burst out at him and shouted: “WILD THING!” And she sent him to bed without eating anything.

We have all been there, whether it was with a child or with an adult. We get pushed just beyond our limit. Though we were plainly clear about our expectations, our child breaks one of our rules. Though we are always there to support them, our friend is never there to support us. Though we do everything we can to get their attention, our spouse is too self-absorbed to see that we have needs of our own. 

And it gets to us. It touches off something deep inside of us -- not just about this particular offense, but about all the times that we have been pushed to the limit, all the times we have felt taken advantage of. And rather than responding in a thoughtful and constructive way, we lose it. We yell at the kids. We punch a wall. We take out our frustration on all of the wrong people.

This is exactly how Moses reacts when he sees the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. He has sacrificed a comfortable life in the palaces of Egypt in order to lead this people from slavery to freedom -- and how do they thank him? The minute he turns his back, they flout one of the ten simple rules.

He feels betrayed. He feels abused. And so he storms down from the top of Mount Sinai. In a fit of rage, he grabs the ten commandments and hurls them to the ground. The tablets shatter into a thousand pieces. He confiscates the golden calf, burns it to a crisp, and grinds the ashes into dust.

In the immediate moment, there is a certain release that comes from lashing out against those who have hurt us. But as we unclench our fists, we begin to see that our outburst did little to help our cause. All we have done is created a cycle of pain, in which hurt is repaid by more hurt.

For Max’s mom, this might be where her story begins. But thankfully for us, it is not where it ends. While Max is upstairs in his room becoming king of his wild things, his mom remains downstairs, setting out on a hero’s journey of her own. Somehow, and without explanation, her anger recedes, her irritation fades. And although she had sent Max to bed without supper, she is now at the stove, warming a bowl of soup for him.

How are we to understand this transformation in Max’s mom -- her move from anger to forgiveness, from explosion to compassion? Maurice Sendak does not say. But if we are to uncover the deeper, hidden meaning of Yom Kippur, we must try to understand this unexplained act of grace.

To help us, let us return to Moses, after the golden calf.

After Moses’s outburst, he returns to the top of Mount Sinai to cool down and to confer with God. He is at his wit’s end. The Israelites have pushed him to the limit -- and he pleads with God for guidance about what he should do next.

And here, God says something peculiar to Moses -- something that later Jewish sages would eventually revisit. When Moses is at his wit’s end, God says to him: “I am a compassionate God, slow to anger and quick to forgive.” But God then quickly adds: “V’nakeih lo y’nakeh, pokeid avon avot al banim v’al b’nei vanim. But I do not always wipe the slate clean -- taking the sins of the parents and extending punishment to their children and grandchildren.”

The writers of the Hebrew Bible present an image of God with which we might be able to identify. We overreact; sometimes God overreacts too. Like us, sometimes God punishes too harshly, making children pay for the misdeeds of their parents. Like us, even God contributes to the endless cycle of pain -- in which hurt is so often repaid by more hurt.

There may be some small degree of comfort in knowing that sometimes even God overreacts. But in this story, the writers of the Hebrew Bible do not get the last word.

Many centuries after the Bible was written, our ancient Rabbis would revisit this story and present us with a different image of God. In their retelling of the story, the Rabbis omit the second half of God’s statement to Moses -- where God admits to sometimes punishing too harshly. And in so doing, the ancient Rabbis present us with a different vision of God than the one that is found in the Torah -- a vision of God that is undeniably bold; a vision that requires theological audacity; a vision so powerful that it makes its way into our High Holiday prayer book, in words that we repeat more often than any others on Yom Kippur, words that we chanted only moments ago. When Moses is at his wit’s end, the ancient Rabbis have God say:

Adonai, Adonai, eil rachum v’chanun, erech apayim v’rav chesed ve’emet, notzeir chesed la’alafim, nosei avon va-fesha v’chata’ah v’nakeih.

“Your Eternal God is compassionate and gracious, endlessly patient, most loving and truthful; showing mercy to the thousandth generation; forgiving evil, defiance, and wrongdoing; wiping the slate clean.”

By keeping only the first half of God's statement, the ancient Rabbis present not an image of God with which we might identify, but rather, an image of God towards which we can aspire -- not a flawed, vengeful, and punishing God, like the all too flawed humans that we know ourselves to be, but rather, a God Whose compassion knows no bounds, Who is endlessly patient and unceasingly forgiving. They present us with a God of grace.

We Jews may feel uncomfortable with the word grace, on account of how central it is to Christian theology. But make no mistakes about it: we Jews, too, have inherited a theology of grace.

Simply put, grace is the idea that sometimes we are granted things regardless of whether we have done anything to deserve them. And on Yom Kippur, the freely given thing that we are granted is forgiveness.

This is a daring idea. It means that no matter what misdeeds we may have committed, no matter how defiant we may have been, God is always ready to forgive. Though we make mischief of one kind and another, though we worship a golden calf, God is always prepared to give us a second chance. Even before we admit to our faults, even before we correct our behavior, God is waiting for us, ready to wipe the slate clean. As our Yom Kippur prayer book puts it: the gates of repentance are always open.

We may bristle at this idea. If God is always ready to forgive, then why bother with doing the right thing in the first place? Does not the world depend on a measure of accountability?

Of course it does. Grace does not mean that we are cleared of accountability -- that we can act however we want without consequence. Rather, grace is the mechanism that makes atonement possible. The promise of forgiveness is what allows us to own up to our mistakes and make amends. 

This is the deeper meaning of Yom Kippur -- the message that is hidden within the pages of Where the Wild Things Are. It is not only by mastering his wild things that Max is able to make the journey homeward. Equally important to his return is a moment we never see; the moment when his mom extends the promise of forgiveness; the moment when she is at the stove, heating a bowl of soup for him; the moment when, all around from far away across the world, Max smells good things to eat, and wants to be where someone loves him best of all. When he knows that open arms await him, Max can begin the journey home.

Tonight, as Yom Kippur begins, each of us will set out on a hero’s journey -- in hopes that we might master our own wild things. And before Yom Kippur ends, we will make the journey home, with the promise of God’s forgiveness extended before us. We will wave goodbye to our wild things, step back into our private boat, sail in and out of weeks, and return home from where our wild things are -- into the night of our very own room, where we will find that our supper is waiting for us.

And it will still be hot.

Independence Day

Yesterday, to celebrate our country’s independence, my family and I went to a friend’s lake house to swim, go boating, eat barbecue, and watch the fireworks. It could not have been a more lovely day. As the sun was setting over the lake, and we were enjoying fresh-cut watermelon and a glass of sangria, my friend turned to me and, with not a hint of sarcasm on his face, said: “Well, this sure beats taxation without representation.”

It was a clever line. But as they say -- it was funny because, on some level, it was true. Like many of our federal holidays, the way we celebrate Independence Day has little to do with what the holiday’s actual meaning. Barbecues and boating have little to do with the lofty ideal of independence from tyranny. On the Fourth of July, we are great at the pursuit of happiness -- less good at remembering that all people are created equal.

Fittingly, as if it were trying to remind us of the deeper themes of July 4th, this week’s Torah portion tells the story of a group of revolutionaries who, like the rebels who founded this country, rose up to challenge the political establishment. The leader of the insurrection was a character by the name of Korach. [1] Korach comes from the tribe of Levi -- those Israelites who were tasked with assisting the priestly class in all of their religious functions. On the one hand, it is a position of pride -- an honor to work in the service of God. On the other hand, it is a lowly kind of honor, only ever assisting the priests with their service -- not performing the sacrifices, but cleaning up after them.

Korach and followers, it seems, have grown jealous of the priests. They rise up against Aaron, the high priest, and accuse him of wielding outsized power. “Your authority is too great,” they say to him. “Don’t you know that all of the community of Israel is holy?” [2] Like the American Revolutionaries, Korach and his gang challenge the balance between established authority and personal freedom.

In the case of Korach, established authority won the day. But for the American Revolutionaries, personal freedom would prove victorious -- not just in the Revolutionary War, but throughout American history. Observers have noted that from the time of this nation’s founding, the spirit of rebellion and revolution seems to have been encoded into our DNA. From Shay’s Rebellion to the draft card burners, Americans throughout history have felt it their natural right to rise up against established authority “when, in the course of human events, they felt it necessary” to do so.

This rebellious spirit takes hold not only in the political sphere, but in every sector of American life -- including in our religious lives. The acclaimed scholar of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna has argued that Jewish religious life in this country has been animated by the principle of personal freedom and independence. As Sarna puts it: if a ragtag bunch of farmers and merchants can rise up and overthrow the world’s greatest colonial superpower, how much the more so in the wake of the Revolution would everyday Jews (and people of other faiths too) feel empowered to rise up and reform their houses of worship.

As proof this revolutionary spirit, Sarna cites several examples from the 1780s and ‘90s of Jewish laypeople officiating at intermarriages, when their rabbis refused to do so -- or nevertheless burying their dead in the Jewish cemetery, under circumstances when Jewish law would have otherwise forbade it.

Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the revolutionary spirit is the emergence of break-away congregations. In the Colonial Era, every city had one synagogue at its center -- one synagogue in Charleston, one in Philadelphia, one in New York -- each with overarching authority in all areas of local Jewish life. But in the wake of the Revolution, that began to change. In New York, a group of young people who had belonged to Congregation Shearith Israel (which we now often call “the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue”) grew tired of the style of worship that was being offered there. In the spirit of the times, they rose up and rebelled -- forming a new congregation called Congregation B’nei Jeshurun (which we now often refer to as “BJ”), that was committed to shorter services, with prayers in English and a weekly sermon. For these early Americans, the Revolution had signaled that established authority can be overturned -- that, as Korach and his biblical band of rebels would have argued, personal freedom and independence are an inherent human right.

Some critics would argue that we in this country have become overly focused on personal freedom -- that we are so independent, we have no one to rely on. Many of us have come to live atomized, disconnected lives -- often unattached from even the people who live next door to us. As the sociologist Robert Putnam has famously described it: the era of crowded Monday night bowling leagues is long since gone. Now, we live in a society that prefers to go bowling alone.

We’ve come to misinterpret the meaning of independence. Independence was never a goal unto itself. The founders of this country were well versed in Enlightenment philosophy, and they believed that society is best seen as a social contract. This idea originated with John Locke, who argued that free individuals get together and contract with one another to create social order. The Revolutionaries’ complaint against King George was not that they should be utterly free to do whatever they wished, but rather that the king had broken their social contract. Take a look at the Declaration of Independence, and you’ll see that the majority of that document is devoted to listing the ways in which King George had broken their trust. [3] They rebelled not so that they could declare their independence from others, but rather, for the exact opposite reason -- because they believed in social contract theory, that there is something we human beings owe to one another.

Yes, we as individuals can and should exercise our independence: to act for our own sake, to be self-reliant, and to rebel against established norms. This is a gift of the United States. But equally, this country has provided us with another gift: to realize that we human beings are social creatures, who rely on one another -- at the very least for safety and sustenance, and if we’re lucky, for companionship, love, comfort, inspiration, artistry, ideas, laughter and so much more.

This Fourth of July weekend, what we need is not a declaration of independence, but rather, a declaration of interdependence. Then, we might live up to the founding insight of this country -- which is: that to be human is to need one another. Do we not hold this truth to be self-evident?


===
[1] For a helpful analysis of Korach’s rebellion, and what differentiates it from the concurrent rebellion led by Datan and Abiram, see Richard Elliott Friedman’s classic, Who Wrote the Bible, p. 172.
[2] Numbers 16:3
[3] For more on this insight, take a listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time-history/id463700741?i=1000368642177 

The Chanukkah Rorschach Test

There’s a hilarious short story about Chanukkah that I love by the novelist Nathan Englander. [1] It tells the tale of a Jewish man named Reb Itzik, the leader of a small Hasidic shul in Brooklyn, who has come upon hard times and cannot afford to keep the lights on in his synagogue. In order to make a little extra money, Reb Itzik takes on odd jobs on the side, moonlighting in order to pay the synagogue’s electric bill.

On a recent December day, Reb Itzik notices a wanted ad in the newspaper. A casting agency is seeking an actor with a particular look for a short-term, seasonal acting job. And although Reb Itzik has no acting experience to speak of, he does indeed fit the look. The casting agency is looking for “a heavy man” -- and Reb Itzik is a bit round in the belly. And preferably, the actor they are looking for will have “a white beard” -- and Reb Itzik, an observant Jew, has never in his life trimmed his beard, which now, in his old age, has indeed faded to white. So Reb Itzik decides to go in for the audition. And before he even has the chance to recite his one and only line, Reb Itzik has been cast… as a department store Santa Claus.

There are many things to love about this story. But the thing that I love most is the way it captures the overwhelming force of the Christmas season. Even this ultra-Orthodox rabbi cannot avoid participating in it. The holiday of Chanukkah is never even mentioned in the story -- but to the perceptive reader, it hovers quietly in the background. A Jew trying to keep the lights on in his synagogue? Sounds familiar -- like the ancient Maccabees who, for entirely different reasons, also struggled to keep the lights burning in their sanctuary. The message of the story is clear: in the United States, Christmas is king, and Chanukkah rides quietly on its coattails. [2]

It might come as little surprise that Chanukkah gets a boost from American Christmas. After all, from the very beginning, Chanukkah has always been something of a chameleon holiday -- able to change its appearance in order to fit the society in which it is being celebrated.

Consider, for example, the story of the miraculous oil, which was only supposed to last for one night, but instead lasted for eight. It is so familiar that even the youngest learners can likely recount it. The only problem is that, if you read the Book of Maccabees -- the earliest version of the Chanukkah narrative -- you’ll find no such story. No oil. No menorah. No miracle.

The story of the oil does not make an appearance until the writing of the Talmud -- at least 400 years after the Maccabean Revolt. In order to understand why the story appears in that time and place, we must understand something about Jewish history. Like their Maccabean ancestors, the rabbis who wrote the Talmud had themselves just lived through a Jewish revolt against an oppressive superpower -- in their case, against the Romans. But whereas the earlier Maccabean revolt had proven successful, this more recent revolt against Rome was brutally crushed. The rabbis were living under Roman occupation -- and they could not afford to provoke the ire of their oppressors. To that end, the rabbis sought to downplay the story of the earlier, successful Maccabean revolt, and instead, to highlight a different story, now famous to us all: the story of the miraculous oil. [3]

Whether the rabbis invented that story from scratch, or whether its absence from the Book of Maccabees can be explained by other reasons, is beyond our purposes tonight. What is relevant is that in one era, Chanukkah was a story about a military victory, and in another era, it became a story about a divine miracle.

So it might come as little surprise that in our era, Chanukkah is largely a story about American Christmas -- and literally so, in the case of Reb Itzik. Chanukkah is a chameleon holiday, able to change its appearance according to the needs of the times. Or, in the words of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Chanukkah is “a holiday Rorschach test. Every community and every generation has interpreted Chanukkah in its own image, speaking to its own needs.” [4]

This evening, I’d like to explore three contemporary understandings of Chanukkah. If Chanukkah is a Rorschach test, then exploring how contemporary Jews see the holiday should tell us something about the Jewish world in which we live. We will examine Chanukkah through the lens of three major groups -- non-orthodox Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Israeli Jews.

One caveat before we proceed: this analysis is purposefully overly simplistic. Each of us will likely resonate with parts of all three groups. The intent is not to pigeonhole any one group, but rather, to try and identify relevant themes that arise along the boundaries of contemporary Jewish life.

With that caveat in mind, let’s look at the results of our Chanukkah Rorschach test.

Let’s start with non-Orthodox Jewry -- a group that includes Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal, secular, and cultural Jews. Non-orthodox Jews tend to think of Chanukkah in spiritual terms. It is a holiday about bringing light into the darkest time of the year. Or, it is a holiday about justice -- about the oppressed overcoming their oppressors. Think, for example, of the lyrics to the Peter, Paul, and Mary song “Light One Candle”: “We have come this far always believing that justice would somehow prevail.” For non-orthodox Jews, Chanukkah’s spiritual message is universal -- applicable to all people, regardless of religious identity.

One particularly compelling example of the universal, spiritual message of Chanukkah comes from the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Perhaps you remember in 2013, when the second night of Chanukkah coincided with Thanksgiving -- a concurrence that was cleverly dubbed “Thanksgivukkah.” The Institute for Jewish Spirituality sent out an email to its supporters, highlighting the shared spirit of gratitude between the two holidays. The email read: “Maybe the deeper ‘miracle’ of Hanukkah is [the way that the Maccabees reacted] when faced with an apparently insufficient amount of oil. Rather than despairing over what they lacked, they saw the good in what they had” [5] -- a posture of gratitude.

Incidentally, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality is not the first group to recognize within the Chanukkah story a theme of gratitude. The ancient rabbis associated Chanukkah with Psalm 30 [6] -- which is a psalm of giving thanks. The psalm tells the story of a person who has experienced a reversal of fortunes. His life had been a mess -- but by the grace of God, he is able to turn things around, and once again believes that life can be beautiful. In the words of the psalm: “[God] turned my mourning into dancing. I shall give thanks forever.”

While the particulars are different, the core messages of Psalm 30 and of the Chanukkah story are the same. In both cases, a bad situation took a turn for the better -- and as a result, we ought to express our gratitude.

These three themes -- light, justice, and gratitude -- exemplify the non-orthodox understanding of Chanukkah. These are universal, spiritual ideals. And indeed, non-orthodox Jewry does understand itself in universal, spiritual terms. Non-orthodox Jews tend to see Judaism as a religion with a universal message -- striving for the good of all people, with little concern for ethnic boundaries.

But this universal, spiritual message brings us face-to-face with our second group: ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Unlike their non-orthodox cousins, ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to understand Chanukkah in highly ethnic terms. To understand why, we need to understand what the Maccabees were fighting for, and what they were fighting against.

Clearly, the Maccabees were fighting for the freedom to practice their religion. Less obvious is that they were equally fighting against the spread of Hellenism. Hellenism was Greek culture, exported around the Mediterranean. Greek culture was highly sophisticated -- producing great works of art, literature, philosophy, and science. It believed in equality between people, and tearing down the barriers that divide neighbor from neighbor. It was the most advanced society that that part of the world had ever seen. In fact, the Greeks believed their culture was so advanced, they thought it was only fair that everyone deserved to get a taste.

The only problem was: not everyone wanted a taste. Regardless of how sophisticated Greek culture may have been, it was not the local culture of kingdoms around the Mediterranean. The Maccabees were fighting not only for religious freedom, they were equally fighting against the idea that everyone ought to participate in the supposedly superior majority culture. They were fighting against cultural homogeneity.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism was born of a similar story. In the early 1800s, as the changes of modernity began to accelerate, as Jews across Europe were finally being emancipated from behind the walls of the ghetto, as Jewish thinkers began to broaden their intellectual horizons -- as these monumental changes were taking root, a rabbi in Hungary named the Hatam Sofer declared: “Change is prohibited by the Torah.” And with that, ultra-Orthodoxy was established. [7]

The Hatam Sofer based his prohibition against change on a well-known midrash -- which says that the reason the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt was because they never assimilated to the majority culture. Specifically: they never took on Egyptian names, wore Egyptian clothing, or spoke the Egyptian language. [8] The Hatam Sofer argued: just as the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt by virtue of their cultural distinctiveness, so too shall we be redeemed from the seismic changes of modernity by virtue of our cultural distinctiveness. And so still today, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities dress, speak, and name their children in the way of their European forebears -- despite what the supposedly superior majority culture might think.

We need only substitute Hellenism with modernity, and the Maccabees with the ultra-Orthodox, and the two stories are a near perfect parallel.

But the parallel doesn’t end there. Many scholars believe that the Maccabean revolt ought to be viewed as an internal Jewish civil war -- between those Jews who embraced Hellenism and those who resisted it. And while thankfully, Jewish in-fighting in our own time has never reached the proportions of civil war, it is easy to see the fault lines over which such a conflict would arise. The first group we’ve examined this evening, the non-orthodox, looks at the Chanukkah Rorschach test and sees a holiday that is about universal ideals -- like light, justice, and gratitude. Our second group, the ultra-Orthodox, looks at the exact same Chanukkah Rorschach test and sees the exact opposite message: a holiday that is about the triumph of the local over the universal. The fault lines have been drawn.

What does our third group -- Israeli Jews -- see when they look at the Chanukkah Rorschach test?

The early Zionists looked to traditional Jewish sources for symbols and stories that they could inherit as their own. And despite the obvious centrality of the Land of Israel to all of Jewish life, when the early Zionists looked at the Jewish calendar, they found surprisingly little material to work with. The Passover story takes place in Egypt; Shavuot and Sukkot take place in the Sinai desert; Purim takes place Persia; Rosh Hashanah is about the creation of world, which takes place everywhere; Yom Kippur and Shabbat are about the restoration of the self, which takes place internally. [9] Among all the Jewish holidays, only Chanukkah takes place in the Land of Israel. The Zionists had found their symbol.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that travelers to Israel during the holiday of Chanukkah may return home with any variety of souvenirs -- but all are certain to return carrying an Israeli dreidel, which, unlike a diaspora dreidel, is not inscribed “a great miracle happened there,” but rather “a great miracle happened here.” Israel is the land of the Maccabees. [10]

But the connection is deeper than just geography. In his recent best-selling book, Catch ‘67, Israeli writer Micah Goodman describes Zionism in the following terms. For two-thousand years before the Zionist movement, Jewish communities had to rely on outside forces for their protection. There were two options from which to choose: rely on God, or rely on governments. Of course, history proved that neither the promises of the Torah nor the promises of kings, caliphs, tzars, and constitutions could ensure Jewish safety. So the Zionists decided to dispense with God and foreign governments. They would have to rely on themselves.

There are names for each of these moves. Giving up on God is called “secularism.” And giving up on governments is called “statecraft.” And indeed, the Zionist movement originated as a secular statecraft.

Let us deal first with the secular. There is a popular Chanukkah song that was written by an early Zionist poet. It’s call Mi Y’maleil -- or, as it is popularly translated into English, “Who Can Retell?” In Hebrew, the song features classical religious language. It speaks of the Hero of Israel, the Messiah, the Redeemer -- terms that, in biblical lore, are typically reserved for God. But in the song’s final stanza, the twist is revealed. In the Chanukkah story, the Redeemer of Israel is not God, but rather, the Jewish people themselves -- as we sing in the English lyrics: “But now all Israel must as one arise, redeem itself through deeds and sacrifice,” just as the Maccabees did.

Similarly, the “statecraft” component of secular statecraft took inspiration from the Chanukkah story. Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, recognized that -- like the Maccabees, who were themselves guerilla warriors -- the Jewish people needed to take responsibility for our own self-defense. Herzl concluded his most influential book, The Jewish State, with the following sentence: “The Maccabees shall rise again.” Indeed, an early version of the Israeli flag featured the word “Maccabee” emblazoned in the center of the Jewish star.

The Zionist movement took the Maccabees as their inspiration as they founded their secular statecraft. They looked at the Chanukkah Rorschach test and saw a story of people who had taken responsibility for their own safety -- dispensing with God and dispensing with foreign governments.

The only problem is that, in so doing, they inadvertently drew two fault lines between themselves and the other two groups we’ve examined tonight. Ultra-Orthodox Jews do indeed rely on God. Non-orthodox Jews -- at least, those of us who live in the diaspora -- do indeed rely on foreign governments.

When contemporary world Jewry looks at the Chanukkah Rorschach test, what we see there are our divisions: three fault lines, that keep each group separated from the others.

***

The Talmud records a famous debate between the great sages Hillel and Shammai, over how the Chanukkah menorah ought to be lit. Hillel argues that we should start with one candle, and add one each night, moving progressively upwards to eight -- the way we light our menorahs today. But Shammai disagrees. He argues that we should start with eight candles, and remove one each night, until, on the last night, only one remains. Two sages, two opposing ideas, one an uncrossable fault line between them.

But I’ve heard it said: that, if only for a brief moment, on the fourth day of Chanukkah, late in the afternoon -- as Hillel is cleaning up his menorah from the night before, and Shammai is setting up his menorah for the night ahead -- for that brief moment, both sages are holding four candles.

If only we could make that brief moment last and last and last -- like a jar of oil that burns for longer than expected.

__________
[1] “Reb Kringle,” from Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. My synopsis here is intentionally modified from the original story in order to capture the story’s comedic tone.
[2] Unlike Christmas, Chanukkah is a relatively minor festival. Chanukkah is theologically poor: unlike Passover, when God redeems the Jewish people from slavery, or Yom Kippur, when God forgives the Jewish people of their wrongdoings -- Chanukkah contains little theological material. Christmas, by contrast, is theologically rich: it tells the story of the birth of God’s son. Chanukkah is also unlike Christmas in that Chanukkah has not, historically, been a holiday of gift-giving. That ritual is traditionally reserved for Purim.
[3] Similarly, the rabbis of the Talmud chose as the haftarah reading for the Shabbat during the week of Chanukkah these pacifistic words from the prophet Zechariah: “Not by might and not by power, but by spirit alone” (Zech. 4:6) shall the Jewish people be redeemed from their sufferings. (Zechariah lived during the time of the Babylonian and Persian oppressions.)
[4] The Jewish Way, p. 277. With gratitude to my teacher Dr. Wendy Zierler for introducing me to that book, and in whose classroom many of the ideas found in this sermon first germinated.
[5] Rabbi Marc Margolius
[6] There are a variety of reasons why the rabbis might have chosen Psalm 30 for Chanukkah -- not least of all, because the psalm includes the word chanukkah in its opening verse, which caused the rabbis to believe (incorrectly) that the psalm was composed at the time of the Maccabean revolt. (Most scholars believe that the psalms were completed by the year 400 BCE; the Maccabean revolt began in 167 BCE.)
[7] This history is brilliant traced in Leora Batnitzky’s book How Judaism Became a Religion. For the story of Ultra-Orthodoxy in particular, see, the book’s conclusion.
[8] Nevermind that, despite what the midrash says, the Torah clearly demonstrates that the Israelites did indeed take on Egyptians names. Moses and Aaron are both names of Egyptian origin, to name but two highly significant examples. The irony deepens when one considers that on Chanukkah, our annual cycle of Torah reading brings us to the story of Joseph -- who, upon assuming the role of royal vizier, changed his name to an Egyptian name, married and Egyptian wife, and named his children with names that mean “I have forgotten my father’s house” and “God has made me fertile in a foreign land.” He is so deeply assimilated that when his brothers eventually come to Egypt to beg for bread, they do not recognize him. For more on this topic, see Arnold Eisen’s article here: http://www.jtsa.edu/joseph-hanukkah-and-the-dilemmas-of-assimilation
[9] While the holiday of Tisha B’Av does take place in the Land of Israel, it is a commemoration of defeat and destruction -- useless themes to the early Zionists.
[10] Additionally: perhaps it’s no surprise that the so called Jewish olympics held every four years in Israel is called the Maccabi Games, and that professional sports teams in Israel bear names like Maccabi Tel Aviv and Maccabi Haifa.

A Window, Not a Wall

I recently got a call from a close friend whose father had died several years ago. My friend and his family were now cleaning out his old childhood home, helping to prepare his mom to move into a smaller place. He was calling to tell me about the strange experience of cleaning the house, how he felt haunted by memories of his dad -- how old pictures, or handwritten notes, or school report cards, or art projects that had once hung on the fridge brought his father so vividly to mind.

My friend told me that it was a windy weekend while they were clearing out the house -- and that each time he stepped outside to load another box into the U-Haul truck, he felt as if his dad was swirling around him in the wind. And finally, when the last room had been cleared, when the boxes were all packed up and loaded into the truck, when the mezuzah had been taken down from the front door, he and his family went to close the door to his childhood home for what he thoughts would be the last time. But as the latch began to click into the doorframe, a strong gust of wind blew up from the street, and the door went flying open. It felt, he said, as if his dad’s spirit just couldn’t bear to leave the old house behind. My friend told me: “I know that my dad wasn’t actually in that gust of wind, but I couldn’t help but cry. It just felt so real. Is that crazy?” he asked.

We can’t say for sure where the dead go after they have died. It is perhaps the most perplexing problem in the human condition. It is not a question that can be answered by empirical observation. It is not a question that can be addressed by reasoning or logic. Any possible answers lie beyond the horizon of human understanding -- outside the boundaries of what we can know for certain.

Where empirical observation fails, faith and belief must suffice. Some anthropologists suggest[1] that this is the very basis of religion: the longing to understand things that are just beyond our understanding -- to know where it is that we come from, and where it is that we go.

Jewish tradition is full of images of how the dead continue to inhabit the world of the living. One tradition[2] teaches that in the days immediately after a person dies, her soul continues to linger on earth -- confused about how to exist without a body, unsure of where to go next, visiting the people and places that she knew in her life. Another tradition[3] teaches that by saying Kaddish, we, the living, help the souls of the dead to find their way to the next world. Still another tradition[4] teaches that the dead can visit us in our dreams, advise us in our affairs, even intercede on our behalf for the betterment of our lives.

Since the Enlightenment, many Jews have kept their distance from beliefs such as these. We have difficulty integrating anything that isn’t able to be proved.

But we don’t have to be naive or foolish to understand what it is that our tradition is trying to express with each of these images. We don’t have to take these claims literally to understand the message. Judaism affirms that the dead, even after they have died, continue to be present in the world of the living. In our memories, they are entirely vivid. When we long for them, they are present to us -- present, by way of their absence. They even continue to influence our world. Our actions continue to be guided by our memories of them. Our choices are still influenced by the place they occupy in our hearts.

Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, of blessed memory, used to tell a story[5] of how his father continued to act in the world, even long after he had died. Schacter-Shalomi had a complex relationship with his father. When he was alive, his father would keep his feelings pent up, let them fester, and release them in fitful outbursts of anger. One afternoon shortly after his father had died, Schacter-Shalomi was driving down the highway, having just taught a class at a local yeshivah. He was unhappy with how the class had gone, and as he was driving, Schachter-Shalomi was stewing about the experience, letting his anger fester and grow -- just as his father had shown him to do. Immediately, Schachter-Shalomi pulled the car over to the side of the road, got out, and said out-loud to his father, as if he were standing right there next to him: “Papa -- you spent your whole life showing me how to explode with anger. But this is one lesson I don’t need anymore. This one, you can keep.”

Schachter-Shalomi felt full well his father’s still very real presence in his life. In releasing himself from his anger, in letting go, he continued to learn from his father -- in this case, by not following his father’s example. Is this not, on some level, a negative example of how the dead are able to intercede in the affairs of the living?

On Sukkot, we Jews participate in the practice of ushpizin. Ushpizin is an Aramaic word meaning “guests” -- and it refers to the practice, originated by the Kabbalists, of inviting guests into our Sukkah. In traditional practice, each day of Sukkot corresponds to one of seven biblical figures, whom we invite into the Sukkah on his or her particular day, in hopes that we might learn a spiritual quality from that guest. On the first day of Sukkot, we invite Abraham into our sukkah, in hopes that we might mirror his quality of hospitality to guests. On day two, we invite Isaac into our Sukkah, in hopes that we might learn from him how to feel awestruck before God. And so on.

On this last day of the Sukkot holiday, we might practice a different kind of ushpizin -- a different way of welcoming guests -- not by inviting biblical figures to come and celebrate with us, by rather, by inviting in our deceased loved ones to join us in this chapel. We invite her in -- and hope to mirror her quality of an inquisitive mind. We invite him in -- and hope to learn how not to let our anger fester and explode. We invite these ushpizin -- these guests -- into our celebration of Sukkot, because we know that they are with us, even when we don’t invite them in. They are with us, even when we are unaware of the role they continue to play in our lives. Our dead are never really gone, our tradition teaches. The space between the living and the dead is “a window, not a wall.”[6]

A short detour, by way of conclusion: Sarah Ruhl is a playwright who has published a book called One Hundred Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. In that book, she writes about what happens when an actor opens up an umbrella on stage.[7] We know that it isn’t actually raining on the stage. But when that umbrella opens, it conjures for us the experience of rain. When the actor lowers the umbrella and shivers, we believe that she is getting cold and wet. We believe in the rain, even though we know plain and clear that the rain isn’t really there.

To ask, “Is it raining on this actor?” would be to ask the wrong question. That is a question of truth or falsehood, when the empirical truth of whether it is actually raining is entirely inconsequential. 

Instead, we ought to ask a question not of truth or falsehood, but rather, of meaning.[8] “Does watching this actor lower her umbrella cause us to shiver, to remember what it’s like to stand out in the cold and the rain? Does seeing this non-reality play itself out on stage allow us to access the actual reality of being soaked to the bone, of feeling exposed to the elements?” These are not true/false questions -- but rather, questions of meaning. Does the combination of that real umbrella and the false rain give us access to a meaningful experience?

So what should we tell my friend who recently moved out of his childhood home? Is it crazy to think that the wind blowing the door open was actually his father?

We cannot say for sure. The answer is simply beyond the realm of human reasoning.

But maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Perhaps we shouldn’t be asking the true/false question of: “Was that actually my father?” Perhaps instead we should ask a question of meaning: “When the wind wraps itself around you, do you remember what it felt like to be held in your father’s arms? When the wind blows the door open, does the lifetime of memories created in that house come pouring out -- unable to be contained?”

These are questions we can answer. These are questions that, quite frankly, are far more interesting than a simple test of truth or falsehood. This is where feeling resides. This is where meaning is made. This is where comfort springs. This is where healing begins.

And so we practice the Jewish art of ushpizin -- of inviting our deceased loved ones into our sukkot celebration -- even though we cannot empirically prove that they have entered into our sukkah. Nevertheless, we sense them. Nevertheless, we feel their presence. We continue learn from their lives. We carry them with us always. We believe that, in some way, they continue to remain with us -- and that experience adds meaning to our lives. Why on earth would we need to prove that?

______
[1] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens, p. 266-267.
[2] BT Sanhedrin 47b
[3] BT Sanhedrin 104a
[4] Finkel, Avraham Yaakov. The Book of the Pious, by Rabbi Yehudah HeChasid, p. 223.
[5] Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman. “On the Afterlife” (audio recording).
[6] Raphael, Simcha Paull. “Grief and Bereavement,” in Jewish Pastoral Care, ed. Friedman, p. 426.
[7] Ruhl, Sarah. One Hundred Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 6-7.
[8] For more on these competing frameworks, see Rabbi Larry Hoffman’s soon-to-be-published essay, “Limits, Truth, and Meaning” (originally delivered as a lecture at the Shechinah conference in the mid 1980s).

The Book of Life

For Gavi Yona, Nomi Yael, and their Papa Jonny, after whom they are both named 

Five weeks before his son was born, Michael Bahler learned that his mother was dying. She had lived with ovarian cancer for five years -- and now, just five weeks before she was supposed to become a grandmother, it seemed that the end was nearing.

Every day, Michael would visit her in the hospital. And every day, as he entered the room, his mother would summon the strength to lift her head off the pillow, if only for a moment, and ask, “Did the baby come yet?” “Not yet,” Michael would tell her -- and she’d sink back down into the hospital bed, her face a mixture of resolve and exhaustion.

A small clock-radio stood at his mother’s bedside, and on the antenna, Michael had taped a printout of his wife’s most recent ultrasound. It hung there like a flag, flown at full mast, urging his mother to continue onward. And although the hospital ethicist had encouraged them to begin end-of-life care; and although both Michael and his mother knew that all of her persistence had only elongated her suffering -- still, she clung to life.

A few weeks later, in the very same hospital, the baby was born. The medical team gave Michael permission to wheel his mother, in a gown and mask, up to the maternity ward. As she held the baby in her arms, tears in her eyes, she looked into her grandson’s face and whispered: “We made it.” She died six weeks later.

Perhaps you know a story like this one. Perhaps it is your own story: the wedding ceremony that is rescheduled to an earlier date so that a dying parent can be there; the bar mitzvah that is made bittersweet by the glaring absence of loved one; the grandparent after whom a new baby is lovingly named, an honor that the parents would rather not have to give.

“To everything, there is a season,” the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. … A time to laugh and time to weep. … A time to dance and a time to mourn. … A time to seek and a time to lose.” [1]

If only our lives were this orderly. If only our experiences could be sorted into neat little boxes -- where the time for mourning never intruded upon the time for dancing, where the time for laughing and the time for weeping never touched, forever separated, like two sets of dishes for milk and for meat.

“Ecclesiastes got it wrong,” charges the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. [2] “A person doesn’t have enough time in his life to have a time for everything. He doesn’t live enough seasons to have a season for every purpose. He must love and hate at the same moment; must laugh and cry with the same eyes; with the same hands, must cast away stones and gather them.”

How are our hearts not to break? When the death of a loved one can interrupt even the happiest day of our life, how are we not to conclude that death is more powerful than birth? The High Holidays ask exactly this question. Rosh Hashanah is a symbol of birth; just ten days later, Yom Kippur is a metaphor for death. Taken together, these High Holy Days simulate what Michael Bahler experienced in real life: that the time to mourn does often intrude upon the time to dance.

The High Holidays test our resolve, asking us: do we dare to affirm that birth is more powerful than death?

***

Rosh Hashanah is a symbol of birth. It is our New Year -- and like a newly born child, we are reminded of our unlimited potential. Our prayer book calls Rosh Hashanah the day that humanity was born -- a metaphor for the day that human beings, with our capacity for change and growth, emerged from the spirals of evolutionary history. We eat pomegranates on Rosh Hashanah, a symbol of fertility -- a fruit so round it resembles a pregnant belly, a fruit whose insides are filled with seeds. We blast the shofar and it sounds like a baby crying -- a wordless, full-throated wail that wakes us from our sleep and calls us to our duty.

Many times over the past few months, my wife, Leah, and I have arisen from our sleep to the sound of a baby crying. We welcomed a new baby into the world this June. Holding our newborn, only a few hours old, we felt the sense of wonder that Rosh Hashanah seeks to inspire. Where did this new life come from? What adventures await her? Who is the person inside of this tiny body?

Author Annie Dillard [3] captures this sense of wonder in her book For the Time Being. She visits a hospital maternity ward, and observes the strange and marvelous things that take place there: the ritual of it all, at once ancient and modern; the doctors, nurses, and midwives dressed each in their respective uniforms, performing their sacred duties like priests in their vestments; the mothers like goddesses, with the power to create life; the newborns with wise eyes, who knew how to be born without having to be told. “This is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth,” Dillard writes. “This is where the people come out.”

Birth brings us to the precipice of life and allows us to soak in the breathtaking view. The Jewish New Year hopes to do the same -- to cause us to believe that anything is possible, that life contains limitless potential.

But even there on the precipice of life, we know the dark truth. All that is born must die. Even though our eyes may now be filled with tears of joy, there will inevitably come a time when those same eyes -- the only pair we have -- will be filled with tears of sorrow. And so, only ten days after Rosh Hashanah, we move on to Yom Kippur -- a day that is a rehearsal for our death.

On Yom Kippur, we do not eat -- making ourselves like corpses, who have no need for bodily sustenance. Some Jews dress entirely in white, evoking the white shroud in which they will someday be buried. During the Ashamnu prayer, as we recount our alphabet of shortcomings, we beat our chests with regret -- pounding upon our hearts, as if we were trying to resuscitate those parts of ourselves that have grown cold and stiff within. As the cantor intones the haunting Kol Nidre chant, we remove our Torah scrolls and stare into the open ark -- an empty wooden box, like the plain pine casket [4] that will someday be our final resting place.

In his bestselling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, Dr. Paul Kalanithi captures how the prospect of our death ignites an urgency for living. Kalanithi was a prominent neurosurgeon, who throughout his career frequently had to deliver the news to patients that they had late-stage cancer. Invariably, his patients would respond with one pressing question: How long have I got left? Not wanting to get pinned to a number, Kalanithi would regularly dodge the question, and instead advise his patients to take it one day at a time.

But only when Kalanithi learned, at the age of 36, of his own cancer diagnosis was he finally able to understand that his patients were asking about more than just a number. If he could know for certain how much time he had left, it would allow him to set his priorities straight. If he only had a week, he would spent it with his family; if he knew he had five years, he might go back to practicing medicine. The prospect of his death forced him to ask: Have I spent my time wisely?

Yom Kippur causes us to confront not only the prospect of our own death, but also the deaths of the people we love. During our Yizkor service, we recite aloud the names of people who have died since last we met on Yom Kippur -- those people whose presence in our sanctuary must this year be no more than a memory, no more than the empty pew where once they sat, no more than the soaring melody that once moved them to tears, and now, in turn, moves us to tears.

It’s been said that grief is the price we pay for love. Jewish tradition affirms that this is true. Our sages teach that the dead are never really gone -- that the space between the living and the dead is “a window, not a wall.” [5] Grief is love passing through that window.

But even this is only a cold comfort. Even if we might commune with them in our grief, our dead remain forever dead. Although we may carry them along with us to every family simcha, they cannot, in any real way, walk us down the aisle at our wedding or hold our newborn child. Their presence will always only be by way of absence -- which causes us to miss them all the more.

Where Rosh Hashanah raises up the potential of new life, Yom Kippur reminds us that we all must meet our end. Like Michael Bahler simultaneously preparing for the birth of his child and the death of his mother, we are forced, on the High Holidays, to face both the beginning and end of life.

When this happens, it would not be unreasonable to lament how quickly time passes -- how the 85-year-old great-grandmother holding a new baby was once a new baby herself. It would not be unreasonable to wish for a firmer boundary between joy and sorrow -- how on Monday, we might be digging in the sandbox with a favorite niece, shoveling sand into a toy dump truck; and on Tuesday, we are burying her grandmother, shoveling earth onto the lid of a casket.

In a way, it is this -- the problem of mortality -- that all religions, [6] at their core, seek to address. Many religions, from the ancient Egyptians onward, solve that problem by holding up the promise of an afterlife -- an eternal heaven that allows us to transcend our death. We Jews also believe that there is a gateway to immortality -- but we differ from other religions on one critical point. We believe that we achieve immortality not through our death, but rather, through our participation in birth. [7]

Birth, the creation of life, is our antidote to death. Birth may not allow us to live forever, but it does allow us to extend ourselves beyond our mortal boundaries.

By birth, we do not exclusively mean biological birth -- though that, of course, is certainly a part of our immortality. The children who carry our genetic code do, in a very concrete way, allow some part of ourselves to live even after we have died. We may stumble across an old childhood photo of our long-dead parent and startle at how much that face looks like our own child’s.

But our gateway to eternal life [8] is wider still than this. We human beings are more than just a face. We are made not just of our genetics -- but rather, of our ideas, values, and beliefs, our traditions, hopes, and stories. Equally to our DNA, it is this -- our humanity -- that we are able to extend beyond the boundary of our death. When our children inherit our values, when our students advance our ideas, when the causes we’ve championed are taken up by others, when our stories are retold by the people whose lives we’ve touched -- some part of us is reborn in the world, even long after we have died.

This, then, is our task: to create, to teach, to build, to serve -- to prove through our actions that birth is stronger than death. This is why, on the High Holy Days, we are forced to confront both the beginning and the end of life -- to force us to choose how we will live: in constant fear of our eventual death, or inspired by the fact that we ever were born.

***

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” There is a time to be born. And there is a time to die. And in between them, there is a messier time -- where birth must collide with death, where joy must meet with sorrow, where victory and pain and defeat all must intermingle: a tangled, disorderly time known as life.

On the High Holy Days, we pray that we might be inscribed in the Book of Life. Like all good books, our lives must come to an end. And like all good books, our lives will contain many stories that are messy and left unresolved. But like all good books, even after they are finished and have been put back on the shelf, our life’s story can always be retold -- and in this way, it will outlast us. We may close the cover and kiss the binding, but the story is written forever -- forever inscribed, the Book of our Life.

__________
[1] Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
[2] “Adam b’chayav / A Man Doesn’t Have Time”
[3] I am grateful to my mentor and friend, Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, in whose writings I was introduced to Annie Dillard and Leon Kass. See, specifically, her “Sermon in a Dream” in her book Raising My Voice (CCAR Press).
[4] The Hebrew word for “ark” is aron; so too, the Hebrew word for “casket” is aron.
[5] Simcha Paull Raphael, “Grief and Bereavement,” in Jewish Pastoral Care, ed. Friedman, p. 426.
[6] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens, p. 266-267: “Of all mankind’s ostensibly insoluble problems, one has remained the most vexing, interesting and important: the problem of death itself. Before the late modern era, most religions and ideologies took it for granted that death was our inevitable fate. Moreover, most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life. Try to imagine Islam, Christianity, or the ancient Egyptian religion in a world without death. These creeds taught people that they must come to terms with death and pin their hopes on the afterlife, rather than seek to overcome death and live forever here on earth. … That is the theme of the most ancient myth to come down to us -- the Gilgamesh myth of ancient Sumer. … He returned home empty-handed, as mortal as ever, but with one new piece of wisdom. When the gods created man, Gilgamesh had learned, they set death as man’s inevitable destiny.”
[7] This idea is articulated beautifully in Leon Kass’s article “L’Chaim and Its Limits”: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/05/lchaim-and-its-limits-why-not-immortality
[8] For a stirring narrative exploration of this theme, see Dara Horn’s novel Eternal Life.

Nomi Yael bat Daniel u-Me'irah

This afternoon, we welcomed our daughter Nomi into the covenant of the Jewish people and gave her her Hebrew name. Below are the remarks we shared about her name.

***

Our sweet Nomi,

Your name, Nomi Yael, is after two of the strongest women in the Hebrew Bible.

Your first name, Nomi, is a character in the Book of Ruth who discovers her strength through acts of kindness. Nomi’s life is one that is marked by tragedy. And yet despite her life’s many challenges, “nevertheless, she persisted.” Nomi finds strength through her relationship with her daughter-in-law, Ruth. The two women go through life caring for one another, and discover that acts of kindness enable them to overcome adversity and heal.

Your middle name, Yael, is a character in the Book of Judges. In Hebrew, Yael literally means “ibex” -- which is a type of mountain goat with great, majestic horns. Standing atop a desert cliff, guarding her territory with her horns upraised, an ibex is a symbol of might and power. So too with the character Yael. She is a symbol of power -- a warrior, who uses her cunning and bravery to slay her people’s greatest foe.

Nomi Yael. Your name carries the legacy of two strong Jewish women: Nomi, who symbolizes kindness, and Yael, who symbolizes power.

As Nomi shows us, we must learn to be kind -- to practice empathy, listening, compassion, and big-heartedness. And although these qualities might sometimes be perceived as “soft,” there is a true strength in kindness -- a gentle strength that can mend what has been broken.

And as Yael shows us, we must also learn to embrace our power -- to be bold, to take a stand, to raise our voice, to protest and resist. And although these qualities are often perceived as brash when they are worn by women, the historical moment that you have been born into shows, maybe even demands, that women must step boldly into their power.

We have found, and we hope that you will find too, that life requires both of these qualities: both kindness and power, both the gentle and the bold -- Nomi and Yael.

***

Your middle name, Yael, is also after my [Leah's] dad, your Papa Jonny -- whose Hebrew name was Yonatan. 

Your Papa Jonny had a certain magic about him -- a spark that transformed even the most everyday of activities into the most amazing adventure. If he took you out to a restaurant, he called it not just a good restaurant or his favorite restaurant -- it was “the greatest restaurant in the history of the world.” He was so taken with the magic of the iPhone that he would call you from his iPhone just to tell you that he was calling from his iPhone. And he knew how to deliver a killer toast and write a heartfelt letter -- never missing an opportunity to put pen to paper and tell the people he loved just how much they meant to him. He believed that life can and ought to feel special, to feel magical, and he wanted everyone to come along for the ride.

This magic -- his gregariousness, his playfulness, his generosity of heart -- was magnetic. People were drawn to him because he made the ordinary feel extraordinary. He was beloved everywhere he went, but it was us, his family, who were the recipients of his most spectacular magic -- his everyday, ordinary love. And although he did have a tendency for the hyperbolic, he would have actually thought that you and your sister were “the greatest in the history of the world.” And I have no doubt that you would have felt the same way about him.

***

Nomi Yael -- we hope that like your biblical namesakes, you will cultivate both kindness and power, recognizing the strength in both.

And we hope that like your Papa Jonny, you will discover that life can, and perhaps ought to feel magical.

But most importantly, we hope that as you carry these names with you, that you will make for yourself your own name in the world.

We love you.