Judaism for the Thinking Person

Dara Horn‘s ”People Love Dead Jews” and the Erasure of Jewish Difference

In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews, which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than challenging us to think of what Jewish lives are like, how they are different, how they might challenge us.  How is it that Wiesel's Night went from its original form, a scathing accusation against the Euopean bystanders who let the Holocaust happen to a book about God's hiding?  Because God's hiding happens in each of our lives, like a universalistic lesson about life's tragedies, and allows us to avoid the deep questions of Jewish difference and anti-Semitism.  In this teaching, I also ask whether we Jews are guilty of this:  inviting in our own Romantic visions of our ancestors --which allows us to live a two dimensional moralizing vision of them-- rather than embracing their difference, and practicing our own.

Changing our Relationship with Time from Productivity to Presence

It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...).  This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other.  We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments. We live outside of time, in a negative relationship, rather than in time, in a positive relationship.  Using Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I reflect on how the pandemic first connected us to a positive relationship with time, vis a vis the Sabbatical Year, but then jerked us back to the negative relationship, as demands for productivity --now virtually impossible and harder than before-- were placed on our backs.  How can we live in time, not through the standard of productivity, but through the invitation of presence?

The Potentially Limitless Commandment of Honoring Parents As They Age

In this dvar Torah, I share Talmudic stories of rabbis trying to honor their mothers in ways that are both comical and also poignant in their alluding to our individual (and often lonely) struggles to honor God and them, especially as they age, with seemingly no yardstick to compare ourselves and manage expectations.

Combatting the Curses Against Israel with History, not more Scapegoating

The last sections of the book of Numbers deal with the local tribes, themselves fighting and displacing each other, refusing to grant the Israelite refugees safe passage through their lands.  As a consequence of this moral failing, they lose the right to keep the land --an important message of Torah.  In fact, coupled with their denials of safe passage, they hire the famous Near-Eastern Bilaam to magically curse the Israelites with fraught words justifying violence against them.  It's like this entire section was relived in the years approaching 1948, when local Arab populations opposed Jewish refugees buying land and living peacefully in British Mandate Palestine, and instead attacked them.  Ever since they resort to Bilaam curses, the use of factually incorrect curse words of "Genocide," "Apartheid," "Settler Colonialism," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Daily Massacres of Children," and "Not Indigenous" to scapegoat Jews and justify violence against them, not just in Israel but in intimidation and harrassment on the campuses in the U.S.  In this Yom Kippur morning sermon, I name this reenactment of the end of Numbers and propose that Jews respond not with compaints about anti-Semitism, but with a campaign of history, along with a renewed consciousness that is not a victim consciousness but is a creator consciousness that is inclusive of Arabs, so we don't lose our moral authority in the Land.

Instagram, Depression and the Serpent Voice: ”And They Knew They Were Naked”

The creation stories of Genesis blend mythological motifs with reflections on the moral consequences of human evolution.  When we understand the serpent voice to be the appearance of the human inner voice --the beginnings of evolutionary, human self-consciousness, a consequence of eating of the fruit of the garden-- then the hiding that Adam does, not because they have disobeyed God (as one presumes on a first read) but because for the first time they know they are naked, is crucial to notice.  The possibilities of self-consciousness are immense --they include becoming like God by living in past, present, and future at once, they include radical intentionality and subjectivity-- but also include the dark side, a preoccupation with self-consciousness in its most mundane meaning, a preoccupation with wondering what people think of one, the feeling of being naked in front of others, the nightmare of showing up at school in one's underwear.  What do people think of us?  Do they like us?  What about our physical appearance are they reacting to?  How do they compare us to others, favorably or unfavorably?  This is the serpent voice in our heads, of our inner "I," the one that nips at our heels and we try to clobber on the head but only goes away only temporarily but always returns.  Research shows that this serpent voice is amplified to monstrous degrees by social media:  Are my posts liked?  Are others making fun of my appearance in the photo?  Am I totally ignored?  Am I left out?  How can I cultivate a persona that garners "likes"?  How can I grown that persona, maintain it, even as it detaches from any connection to my authentic self, so when God says, "Ayekah?"  Where/who are you really?  God knows the self I'm wearing is the product of the serpent voice, my cultivated and emotionally crushing phony self?

The Halakhah of Zoom Minyan: Adding Windows to the House of Israel

Synagogues like mine have resorted to making virtual community over much of the pandemic.  How do we do a heshbon nefesh of the experience:  a reckoning of the pluses and minuses as we enter a new future of self-creation?  What is the halakhah of it, what have we learned, what are the issues?  In this Kol Nidrei sermon, I address these issues, as we consider who we wish to be as we enter the future.

The Victim Triangle: Moving from Blame to Self-Creation, from Drama to Authenticity

Our society is permeated with a victim mentality that presents itself as prophetic, but is punitive.  Caught in the Victim Triangle, everyone must fit into a role of Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer --both in individual dramas and in societal theory.  Change presents itself only in the options of shifting roles in the triangle:  persecutors must become victims, victims will fix things by teaching them (and society) a lesson, someone gets stuck in rescuer role.  Is teshuvah, repentance, about being forced to experience the karma of society's ills, or is that a blame game?  In this sermon, I present an alternative framework, rooted in systems psychology and in Torah:  teshuvah is an act of Creation, and when one transcends the triangle, one reaches true authenticity in one's walking with others, walking with oneself, and walking with God.

It‘s Time to End the Fertility Bias: Our Shame in Shutting Out Those Without Children

How often do people say to me, "Rabbi, Rosh Hashanah is not about prayers, theology and sermons -- it's about getting together with family!" or "My grandfather was a model Jew because he was committed to his grandchildren" or "One does not know true awe until one has had children."  And how often have I as a rabbi said similar things at a bat mitzvah or baby naming from the bimah, or when explaining a prayer like the one that says "You shall love God...through diligently teaching your children..."   How does this feel to the unmarried, the willingly child-free, and those whose lives are not geared around children or grandchilden?  How do we treat them in our community:  as souls committed to covenant (perhaps more than those with children), or as incomplete human beings watching from the outside?  Why aren't we talking more about Miriam, who has no husband or children in the Torah?  Or about the Mother of Israel, the historical creator of the Israelite nation, the prophetess and leader Deborah?  It's time we stop and realize that L'Dor Vador, from generation to generation, does not refer just to one's own children, but to the future of the Jewish people, something the childless and child-free often understand in a way that we can learn from them as our teachers. 

Saving One Life is Saving the World: Jewish Law and the Death Penalty

In the parashah of "Shoftim" in Deuteronomy, we have the norms for  shoftim v'shotrim, the judges and professional criminal justice system officials.  We are commanded that tsedek tsedek tirdof, known as "justice, justice you shall pursue" though tsedek means "justice" in the sense of "righteousness," not in the sense of revenge.  The parashah goes on to discuss capital crimes, an eye for an eye, and the death penalty.  For many, they read it assuming that Judaism endorses the death penalty, with "eye for an eye" the "justice" principle underlying the norms.  In this teaching, I show how "eye for an eye" and the death penalty have been understood in Judaism, how restorative justice is the underlying paradigm of Jewish law with the one exception being intentional murder.  But in this special case of capital justice, the entire legal system is set on eliminating the death penalty so as not to risk killing even one innocent suspect.  The famous Rabbinic dictum that "to save a life is to save an entire world" is used by the Rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin to argue for saving the life of the suspect in a capital case, for when we use the death penalty, and should we be wrong (common in America), we have done irretrievable harm to the fabric of the universe.

The Depth of Loving Torah and Being Loved Through It: Being Taught is to Be Loved

After Moshe recounts the 10 Commandments --the 10 "word-statements"-- in Deuteronomy chapter 5, we get the Shema and the Ve-Ahavta, we must Hearken to "these words," incribe them in our hearts, and return God's love by loving through teaching these words.  What are the words?  Given the context of chapter 5, it would make sense these are the 10 Commandments, perhaps to be the text of the mezuzah and teaching the VeAhavta is exhorting.  Of course, the Rabbis argue vociferously that this cannot be, and just gives unwarranted support to Karaites and others who deny the Torah by reducing it to the 10 Commandments.  (The Rabbis have some justification for their argument.)  So "these words which I command you this day" become the entire set of teachings of the written Torah and our own interpretations that all happen through the act of God's love and our Love for God, and therefore the Mezuzah includes this selection about Love.  What does it mean to love Torah?   Delivered on the day of Tu B'Av, the annual Jewish "Valentine's Day" that celebrates falling in love and romance, I share my experience of love and loving a Torah that goes beyond sentences.