Jack Be Nimble and Jill

200 Billion Trillion

The Fire Next Time

This week's Torah portion tells how the Israelites were accompanied on their journey through the desert by a Pillar of Smoke and a Pillar of Fire -- much like the smoke that filled our air this week, wafting from the fires in Canada. What can our ancient story tell us about the ecological threats imperiling our planet?

Contact our congregant Linda Moot to get involved in synagogue's efforts to combat climate change.

Blue and White

One of my earliest Jewish memories comes from my childhood synagogue when I was five years old and in kindergarten. It was the holiday of Simchat Torah – a time when we take our Torah scrolls out of the ark and parade them around the sanctuary. The whole congregation (it seemed, in my five-year-old imagination) was there – marching, singing, and dancing in the aisles.

Our kindergarten religious school teacher had given me and my classmates each a flag to carry as we marched in the processional. The flag, I remember, was blue and white: with two blue stripes against a white background, and in the center, a big, blue Jewish star. I took the flag in my hand, joined the parade, and waved it to my heart’s content. I was so filled with joy, I could have done cartwheels down the aisles. And although I did not know what flag I was waving, I knew in the depths of my heart that this flag was my flag – that blue and white were my colors.

This past week, Jews all around the world celebrated Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. And this year, it was a milestone anniversary, marking 75 years since that iconic moment when David Ben-Gurion – standing at a long dias, with a portrait of Theodor Herzl hanging above his head – read the Declaration of Independence aloud into a tinny microphone, and then a rabbi, his voice trembling with emotion, stammered his way through the shehechiyanu blessing, as Jews all around the world crouched beside their radios and wept with tears of joy.

If you’ve never celebrated Yom HaAtzmaut in Israel, it is a special experience. Israel is a small country – so seemingly everywhere you turn, there’s a celebration happening. There are people singing and dancing in the streets until all hours of the night, fireworks in every city, everyone dressed in blue and white, and Israeli flags and banners hanging from every street lamp. The next day, after sleeping off the previous evening’s festivities, the whole country, it seems, goes out to their nearest public park or garden – bringing with them their mangal (their portable grill) for an outdoor barbeque picnic. The air grows thick with the smell of burning charcoal and roasted meat – a scene that has often been compared to what it must have been like in ancient times when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, and worshippers would bring burnt offerings before God: an aroma that the Torah describes as “an odor pleasing to God,” a delight to the nostrils.

Looking back at that formative childhood memory, of marching around our synagogue’s sanctuary and proudly waving the Israeli flag, I recognize that a powerful feeling had been planted within me: a seed that was only just beginning to grow, that would continue to mature and blossom in the decades to come – and although I certainly did not have a word for it back then, I knew, in the depths of my heart, that I was a Zionist.

In recent years – and this past year, in particular – there has been much conversation in the Jewish world about the meaning of the word “Zionist.” If you listen to American political discourse, you might reasonably imagine that “Zionist” is a binary term: something you either are or you are not, an ideology that you are either for or against. This is so often our tendency in American political life: to reduce the conversation into two opposing camps, and to force each of us to pick which side we are on.

But of course, we Jews understand that the word Zionist is much more nuanced than this. In 2011, Moment Magazine published a symposium, a series of short essays written by prominent Jewish thinkers and leaders, on the question “What Does It Mean to be Zionist Today?” The range of answers was fascinating: a broad spectrum of ideas, some of them complementing one another, others of them contradicting one another. Clearly, in the Jewish community, Zionism is not some monolithic ideology which you are either for or against. Rather, the term is nuanced, textured, and layered – such that, although two Jews might both describe themselves as Zionists, they might each mean something completely different in their use of the word.

This past year, in particular, the meaning of the word Zionist has been up for debate. The State of Israel is undergoing enormous social change. The recent November election brought to power the most right-wing and most religiously observant governing coalition in the country’s history. Politicians who have trafficked in inflammatory rhetoric – against the Palestinians, against the Arab citizens of Israel, against the LGBTQ community, against Reform and Conservative Jews – have been appointed to the cabinet, at the helm of powerful government ministries. Perhaps most recognizably from the newspapers, a proposed set of judicial reforms would alter Israel’s system of checks and balances, diminishing the role of the Supreme Court, and effectively empowering the Knesset to pass whatever laws they might like without any judicial oversight.

In response to all of this, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have taken to the streets in protest. And as a result of their demonstrations, the judicial reform has been put on pause – at least for now.

And also in response to all of this, many American Jews have found themselves wondering how they should relate to the State of Israel, and whether they should continue to call themselves Zionists. Over the past several months, Rabbi Schecter and I have facilitated dozens of group conversations in which TBS congregants have time and again wondered the same thing: Given all that is happening there, can we continue to support Israel? Do we recognize ourselves in the state? Should we continue to give our funds? Should we continue to send our children? Is it perhaps time, I have heard American Jews ask, to give up on the Zionist project entirely?

Let me say now, so that you don’t have to hold your breath, that I strongly believe that we should not give up on the Zionist project. And to help us understand why, let us first try to understand exactly what it is that we are talking about when we use the word “Zionist” – that term that, on its surface, seems to be a binary: something that you either are or are not, as clear as black and white (or, if you prefer, blue and white). Let instead try to scratch beneath the surface: to reach for a more nuanced, more textured understanding of the word, in order to help us make sense of our current political moment. 

***

The word “Zionist” was coined in 1890 by a little-known Jewish writer from Vienna named Nathan Birnbaum. He was only a university student at the time, publishing a small student magazine devoted to politics and Jewish thought. And it was in that little magazine, published nearly a decade before Theodor Herzl would begin to write about the topic, that the word “Zionism” first appeared in print: Zionismus, in Birnbaum’s native German.

But even though Birnbaum gave us the word, he did not give us its definitive meaning. Especially in those early years, there were Zionists of many stripes.

There were those who used the term in a plain and simple way: seeking to establish a sovereign, independent Jewish State in the Land of Israel.

There were those, by contrast, who would call themselves only “territorialists”: seeking a Jewish state, but not convinced that it needed to be in the Land of Israel – happy to settle for any tract of land that could be made available, with supporters proposing as possible locations Uganda, Argentina, and (no joke) Buffalo, New York.

There were political Zionists, who believed that the most important factor in establishing a Jewish state would be persuading the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations to get on board with the project.

There were agricultural Zionists, who believed that the most important factor wasn’t convincing the nations of the world, but rather, moving to the Land of Israel – buying farms, planting orange groves, and “making the desert bloom.”

There were cultural Zionists, who believed that the most important thing would be fostering a Jewish cultural renaissance: a rich, new civilization rooted in the Land of Israel, where Hebrew songs, Hebrew plays, Hebrew art, and Hebrew philosophy would flourish, thereby enriching the culture not only of the Jewish state, but also, of the entire Jewish world – an antidote to assimilation.

There were American Zionists, who – uniquely in the tapestry of Zionist thought – felt comfortably at home in their nation of origin, and expressed their support not by moving to the Land of Israel, but rather, by providing philanthropy: first, by putting nickels in their little blue JNF tzedakah boxes, later, by investing in Israel bonds, and today, by securing congressional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

There were Zionists who were vociferously opposed to the diaspora – who believed, in Hebrew, in the principle of sh'lilat ha-golah – that 2000 years of homelessness had left the Jewish people weak, passive, with too many brains and not enough braun, that the Zionist project would never be complete until all the world’s Jews were safely relocated to the Land of Israel.

And there were those who were opposed to Zionism – who cared deeply about the Jewish people, but did not believe that our collective identity needed to be expressed through the establishment of a sovereign state.

As the Jewish historian Noam Pianko has observed: his field is not the history of Zionism, but rather, the history of Zionisms.

Just as, in those early years, the word “Zionist” did not mean just one thing, the same is true today. There are Religious Zionists, Ultraorthodox Zionists, religious pluralist Zionists, Greater Israel Zionists, liberal Zionists, Two-State Zionists, One-State Zionists, Christian Evangelical Zionists – the list goes on and on.

Given this range of meanings, it is easy to understand how two people might both describe themselves as Zionists, but each mean something completely different in their use of the word. In the years since Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term, it is a word that has (to frame it in the positive) been able to support a multiplicity of definitions. Or, alternatively (to frame it in the negative): it is a word that has suffered from a confusion of meaning.

To help us make sense of our current political moment, it might be helpful to look for a new word: to do as Nathan Birnbaum did and coin a new term – not to abandon the Zionist project, but rather, to find new language that clarifies exactly what it is that we feel for the State of Israel.

Near the end of his life, Theodor Herzl wrote a novel called Altneuland – a German title, which means: “The Old-New Land” (referring, of course, to the old Land of Israel, which would soon be made new). Following Herzl’s lead, perhaps what we need is not a new word, but rather, an old-new word – a word from the Jewish past that we revive and reclaim, to help us clarify our feelings for Israel.

To do so, let us look to the very beginning of the Zionist movement, before David Ben-Gurion, before Herzl, even before Birnbaum, to the very earliest stages of Jewish national aspiration – to a little group in Eastern Europe who are considered the forerunners and precursors of the Zionist movement: a group whose name in Hebrew was Hovevei Tzion, a term that means “the lovers of Zion.”

Hovevei Zion was a loose network of small, local Jewish groups that sprung up all across the Russian Empire in the wake of pogroms of the 1880s. They saw that their safety in Europe was at risk, and decided that the best solution would be to leave for the Land of Israel. They came from small towns and villages, had little money, had even less influence, and had received only a traditional Jewish education. Their strategy for establishing a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was to work piecemeal – acquiring, in the words of their Hebrew motto, od eiz v’od dunam, buying “one more goat, and one more quarter-acre of land” at a time. They were not well organized; when they tried to plan a conference for all of their followers, a mere thirty people attended.

But what they lacked in organizational acumen, these “lovers of Zion” made up for both in passion and in courage. In 1882, a group of ten Hovevei Zion activists packed what little they had, left the Russian Empire, moved to the Land of Israel, and established the town of Rishon LeTziyon – the first new Hebrew city.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, Theodor Herzl – who had been raised in a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family in the big city of Budapest, and had himself never personally experienced the kind of anti-Jewish violence that his coreligionists in the Russian Empire had endured – Herzl, more than a decade after the founding of the first Hebrew city, suddenly was awakened to the threat of European antisemitism – when Alfred Dreyfus, a high ranking Jew in the French military, was wrongly accused of espionage. Herzl quickly sprung into action, trying to convince the most influential Jews of Western Europe – the biggest philanthropists, the most important businessmen, the chief rabbis of major cities – to support the establishment of a Jewish state.

Herzl decided to organize a conference, and invited all these influencers to attend. But one by one, they each said no – afraid that this political activity might jeopardize their standing in their home countries.

With the conference fast approaching, and no prominent Jews planning to attend, Herzl decided to instead turn his attention elsewhere – seeking not a handful of wealthy and influential supporters, but rather, a vast swath of poor, marginal, but nevertheless deeply passionate Jews whom he had heard about, a group that had already for quite some time been making slow progress towards establishing a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel: a group known as Hovevei Zion, “the lovers of Zion.”

It was a perfect pairing. With Herzl’s political acumen and financial connections, and Hovevei Zion’s sheer numbers and fervent belief in the cause, the conference – which would later be known as the First Zionist Congress – was an enormous success, what the scholar Daniel Polisar has referred to as “the most politically significant meeting of any group of Jews in the last 1,800 years.”

***

Today, when we think about Zionism, we think about Herzl. What if, instead, in our search for a new, more helpful term to describe our feelings for the State of Israel, we looked not to Herzl, but rather, to his partners? What if, instead of using the ambiguous word “Zionists,” those of us who care deeply about the State of Israel instead referred to ourselves as Hovevei Zion, as “lovers of Zion”?

Love, after all, is a complex emotion. It has room both for critique and for admiration, both for anger and for care.

Love, after all, is what all those hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been expressing as they take to the streets week after week in protest. They are out there not because they can’t stand their country, but rather, because they love it. Perhaps you’ve seen the stirring images of the protestors. They are out there not in pink hats, like at the 2017 Women’s March; they are out there (and, to be clear: with no equivalence between the Women’s March and what I’m about to describe) – the protestors are out there not waving the Confederate Flag, like at the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Rather, they are out there by the hundreds of thousands waving the Israeli flag: expressing their patriotism, their love of the country that they, and I, and I hope many of us hold so dear; showing that they are not giving up on this place, and neither should we; showing that they are Hovevei Zion – lovers of Israel, proudly waving the flag, a sea of blue and white.

This, after all, is the sensation that I felt when I was five years old and marching around the sanctuary of our synagogue; the feeling that I did not yet have a word for as I was proudly waving the flag; the feeling not only that this flag was my flag, and that blue and white were my colors, but rather, something much deeper than that: a feeling of love for the Jewish people – the feeling, though I did not yet have the words, that I was a Hoveiv Zion.

This is why, when we recite Israel’s national anthem, we lift our voices and sing: kol ‘od balevav penimah / nefesh Yehudi homiyah / … ‘od lo avdah tikvatenu. “As long as in the heart within, the Jewish soul still yearns… then our hope is not yet lost.”

Israelis protesting the judicial reform

The Eternal Relevance of Purim

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.