The Gospel of Judas

I grew up in a family that loved movie musicals. [1] The rack of VHS tapes underneath our television was stocked with all the classics: West Side Story, Singin’ in the Rain, Oklahoma! You name it, we’d seen it.

 But there was one musical that, although I had many opportunities to see it as a kid, I always backed away from: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of the bible belt, I felt no need to watch a musical about Jesus. I felt myself sufficiently surrounded by Christian religious influences. I did not feel the need to seek out more in my spare time.

And so it was somewhat begrudgingly this past Sunday evening that I tuned in to watch NBC’s live broadcast of the musical. And I have to say that, despite my hesitations, I really, really enjoyed it.

The musical tells the story of the final days of Jesus’s life: the last supper, Jesus’s arrest, his trial, and eventual crucifixion. Bible scholars refer to this story as “the passion narrative” -- where the word “passion” is used in its original Latin sense, meaning “suffering.” It is the story of Jesus’s suffering. But unlike most versions of that story, the musical is told not from the perspective of Jesus, but rather from the perspective of Judas -- the disciple who, according to Christian scriptures, betrays Jesus by turning him over to the authorities.

Through Judas’s eyes, we see a different version of the story than we may be used to. We see Jesus not only as a charismatic preacher who loves the downtrodden, but also, as the title of the musical suggests, as a “superstar” -- a pop-culture phenom, who quickly gets carried away by his own rising fame. Through Judas’s eyes, Jesus looks like a rockstar who is thrilled with all of his positive publicity and is veering dangerously close to believing all the hype about himself -- that he may in fact be the son of God. [2]  In this context, the 12 disciples become his groupies, more interested in riding Jesus’s coattails than in healing the sick. [3]  As Jesus’s popularity grows, so too do the threats against his life. And so Judas decides to turn his beloved teacher in -- with hopes that Jesus’s teachings, rather than his stardom, will live on.

In this way, the musical is like a familiar genre of Jewish literature -- the genre of midrash, in which events from the Bible are retold from a contemporary perspective in order to provide them with new layers of meaning. Jesus Christ Superstar is a modern Christian midrash -- and in my view, a powerful one.

And yet, watching the musical along with nine-and-a-half million other Americans this past Easter Sunday, I felt, at many points, uneasy. Because even when it is told from the perspective of Judas, the passion narrative presents what is, at best, an unflattering view of those Jews who did not follow Jesus. At worst, it flatly condemns those Jews for Jesus’s death. Consider the following narrative details that originate in the New Testament and find their way into the musical. We see Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest, plotting for Jesus’s capture; the Sanhedrin, an ancient Jewish court, decreeing that Jesus is guilty; a riotous Jewish mob demanding that Jesus be crucified; and of course, there’s the villain himself -- Judas, the betrayer, whose very name could not be any more evocative of the Jewish people he’s made to represent.

For centuries, passion plays performed on Easter Sunday inflamed Europe’s Christian masses against their Jewish neighbors. Hitler famously described one particularly brutal passion play as “history’s most convincing portrayal of the menace of the Jew.” And although, in 1965, the Catholic Church issued a formal proclamation stating the Jews could no longer be blamed as Christ-killers, the epithet has continued to stick. Perhaps you remember Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ -- and the controversy over whether the film carried a blatantly anti-Jewish message.

Consequently, mine was not the first set of eyebrows to raise over the possible anti-Jewish undertones of Jesus Christ Superstar. When the musical was first made into a film in 1973, it was sharply criticized by both the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. Despite its sympathetic portrayal of Judas, the musical is seemingly inexorably yoked to the anti-Jewish heritage of the Christian scriptures.

We cannot seek to rewrite the Bible. We can, however, seek to better understand the Bible, by exploring the historical circumstances in which it was written. We Jews are accustomed doing this with our own tradition -- reading the Hebrew Bible with a critical eye, employing the best of contemporary scholarship to help uncover the possible motives of the people who wrote it. [4]  We do this not to pick our tradition apart, or to devoid our people’s stories of their transformative power. Rather, we bring this critical lens to our biblical scholarship in order to add yet another layer of depth and understanding to the text we hold so dear. Especially in places where that text has been used not as a tool for spiritual elevation, but rather, as a bludgeon for denying the humanity of another human being, our scholarly lens is critically important.

I like Jesus Christ Superstar -- as a musical, and as an ingenious work of modern Christian midrash. But if we are to love the show even despite its anti-Jewish undertones, then we had better bring our critical lens to the text that informs it. We had better understand the Christian scriptures and the world that created them. [5]

First, let us understand that, although the New Testament tells stories from the life of Jesus, those stories were not written down until many decades after Jesus died.

Second, and perhaps more important, Christian scripture, like the Hebrew Bible, is not one book, but rather is a collection of books that are all on the same topic. It is like a library -- with a variety of books, composed by a variety of authors, writing in a variety of different times and places. As is the case in a library, some of these authors drew upon each other’s work. Other authors unwittingly contradicted each other’s work. Thus, when we talk about “the passion narrative,” we are not talking about a single story told sequentially in a single volume, but rather, about a patchwork of disparate stories sewn together over time.

If we carefully take apart the stitching, we can trace how different versions of the same story evolved and changed over time. For a helpful example, let’s follow one story that is central to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Let’s trace the evolution of the stories about the Last Supper and Judas’s betrayal of Jesus.

The earliest stratum of the New Testament is the letters of Paul -- written around the year 50 of the Common Era. In these letters, the Last Supper is described, but the detail about a betrayal is conspicuously absent. [6]  What’s more, not once in all of Paul’s letters is the name Judas even mentioned. It seems that in the 50s of the Common Era, the story of Judas’s betrayal did not yet exist.

But just a few short decades later, all of that would change. The next-written statum of the New Testament is the Gospel of Mark, written around the year 72 CE. This book not only mentions a betrayal, it ascribes that betrayal to Judas. [7]  In still the next stratum of the New Testament, the story takes on even greater detail. The Gospel of Matthew [8]  picks up where Mark had left off -- and adds that Judas, recognizing his guilt, decides to take his own life.

Using our critical lens, we see that there is no one story of Judas at the Last Supper. Rather, there is a patchwork of stories that evolved over time, one building upon another, which were eventually sewn together into what we now call the Christian scriptures.

But we ought to wonder: what happened in those critical decades between the writing of the first stratum and the second? What happened that caused Mark to write a story about Judas’s betrayal when Paul, only twenty years earlier, had seemingly never heard of such a story? To answer this question, we need to understand the historical context in which the New Testament was written.

In the year 64 CE, a disastrous fire tore through the city of Rome. Perhaps you’ve heard the charge that the emperor, Nero, fiddled while Rome burned. That charge is debatable. But what we can verify [9]  is that Nero blamed the fire on the Rome’s burgeoning Christian community. Nero captured and killed Christians by the hundreds. Those that he didn’t kill, he tortured, and compelled them to turn in their fellow Christians who were in hiding. These events rocked the early Christian community, imperiling their safety throughout the Roman empire.

Meanwhile, only two years later, in 66 CE, a Jewish revolt against Roman rule broke out in Jerusalem. Rome bit back, and hard. And although the early Christians were not centrally involved in the revolt, they keenly felt its impact. Early Christians grew wary of being too closely associated with their rebelling Jewish neighbors -- with whom they shared a homeland, a religious tradition, and in many cases, family ties.

These events in the 60s of the Common Era -- Nero’s fire in Rome, and the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem -- destabilized the early Christian community. Naturally, they sought to ingratiate themselves to Rome and distance themselves from the Jewish rebels. What’s more, to buoy their strengths, early Christians needed a model for how a righteous person would respond to betrayal by a friend, as many of them were being betrayed by their friends unto Nero.

To address these needs, early Christians looked for inspiration to the book that they held sacred -- the Hebrew Bible. [10] They found there, in the Book of Genesis, the story of a group of twelve confidants, in which one of the twelve sold out another -- the story of Joseph and his brother Judah. [11] It was a perfect fit. The story of Joseph and Judah evolved into the story of Jesus and Judas.

The character of Judas quickly became the early Christians’ tool for distancing themselves from the Jewish rebels and ingratiating themselves with Rome. Other examples [12] would be built upon it, but the character of Judas would remain the symbol par excellence of the New Testament’s anti-Jewish sentiment.

And it is for precisely this reason that I love the musical Jesus Christ Superstar so much. Because, although the show may be prone to many of the New Testament’s regular anti-Jewish themes, the show also does something unique. It gives Judas a fair chance -- a chance to tell his side of the story.

As Jews, we, too, need to understand Judas’s side of the story -- not by writing a musical about him, but rather, by learning as much as we can about the Christian scriptures and the world that shaped them.

If I could, I would tell a younger version of myself not to back away from watching Jesus Christ Superstar, but rather, to lean in and learn as much about the story as possible. If I could, I would tell that younger version of myself that it is only by understanding the world that shaped the Bible that we can come to understand the world that the Bible has shaped.

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[1] The title of this sermon refers to a non-canonical (Coptic) book -- pseudonymously ascribed to Judas, which is possibly dateable to the 2nd/3rd century CE -- entitled The Gospel of Judas. That book contains imagined conversations between Judas and Jesus, in which Jesus instructs Judas to turn him over to the authorities. The Gospel of Judas was published in English, with great fanfare, in 2006.
[2] See, for example, the lyrics to the show’s opening song, “Heaven on Their Minds,” sung by Judas: “You've started to believe / The things they say of you. / You really do believe / This talk of God is true. / And all the good you've done / Will soon get swept away. / You've begun to matter more / Than the things you say.”
[3] See, for example, the lyrics (which, to my eye, are intended to be understood as haughty) to “The Last Supper,” sung by the Apostles: “Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. / Knew that I would make it if I tried. / Then when we retire, we can write the Gospels, / So they'll still talk about us when we've died.”
[4] This method of biblical scholarship is broadly referred to as “source criticism.” For a crash course, see: Friedman, Richard Elliott. Who Wrote the Bible? San Francisco: Harper One, 1997.
[5] In this effort, I am deeply indebted to my teacher, Rabbi Michael Cook, Ph.D. Much of the research that follows is based on his book: Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Context. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2008.
[6] See I Corinthians 11:23. Cook and others (The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Oxford University Press) argue that the word in that verse that is often translated as “betrayed” would be better translated as “handed over [unto death].”
[7] Mark 14:43
[8] Written circa 85 CE. See Matthew 27:3ff.
[9] Tacitus, Annals, xv.44
[10] The traditional Christian argument would be that the events in the Hebrew Bible predicted the events of Jesus’s life. A source-critical eye recognizes that it is far more likely that Christian scriptures borrowed motifs from the Hebrew Bible (just as the Hebrew Bible borrowed from its antecedent sources).
[11] See Genesis 37:26. The parallels continue. Judah, like Judas, betrays his brother/confidant: (1) at a meal, and (2) in exchange for a small sum of silver.
[12] For example: the Sanhedrin trial and the Barabbas episode. For a detailed discussion, see Cook, chs. 11-12.

In Response to Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”

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

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

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

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

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

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

#MeToo

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

Gratitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kein y’hi ratzon -- may this be so.

Truth and Faith

Natural Religion

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

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abraham as … Logician

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

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

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

… Naturalist

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

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

… Ethicist

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

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

Maps of Grief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clean Plate Club

Westchester Reform Temple | Scarsdale, NY
Yom Kippur Afternoon 5778


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

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

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

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

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

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