Yom Kippur Sermon: A Prayer for Our Country

It was 1812 and Napoleon and his armies had invaded the Russian Empire, where the plurality of world Jewry lived.

Napoleon was a paradoxical figure. He had risen to prominence during the French Revolution, and despite having crowned himself as Emperor he still espoused the revolutionary ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The success or failure of his army had a tremendous influence on Jewish life. Although the United States had been the first country to extend full citizenship to Jews, in the early 1800s America was really a backwater for world Jewry. The majority of Jews in the world lived in Europe. They lived in Europe but they were not of Europe. They were not citizens of the countries where they resided, no matter how long their families had lived there. In many cases they did not speak, or barely spoke, the local language, speaking Yiddish and learning, praying, and writing in Hebrew. But wherever Napoleon’s armies advanced, that changed. In the spirit of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Jews were made equal citizens. They could participate in society on an equal basis. They could have the same education as everyone else and could enter any profession they wished.

So as Napoleon and his army approached the heartland of Hassidism, the rebbes had a decision to make. Should they support Napoleon? Some of the rebbes, most prominent among them Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, did support him, since he would free the Jews from Czarist oppression and antisemitism. Others, such as Shneur Zalman of Liady, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, supported Czar Alexander I, arguing that while Napoleon might well liberate the Jews from their physical shackles, he would also introduce them to “enlightenment” ideals which could lead them away from their religious strictures as well. The rebbe did well to worry. While Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was rebuffed, Enlightenment ideals did eventually make their way east, and by the late 1800s most Jews in Eastern Europe were no longer fully observant.

The chasidic rebbes’ debate over whether to support the Czar or Napoleon was a marker of Jewry having entered into the modern era. Although Fiddler on the Roof was set in 1905, 91 years later than the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, the Rabbi’s blessing for the Czar -- “may God bless and keep the Czar, far away from us” reflects a pre-modern understanding of the relationship between Jews and the government. In Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Hanina the Deputy High Priest, says: “Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, man would swallow his fellow alive.” Rabban Gamaliel says “Be cautious with the people who govern, for they draw a man near in friendship only for their own purposes. They show themselves as friends when it is to their benefit, but they do not stand by a man in his hour of difficulty.” In other words, throughout most of our history, the Jews viewed government as a necessary evil. Necessary, because even a repressive government was better than anarchy. But evil, because in the best of circumstances Jews were tolerated as long as they proved useful to the ruling authorities, but could never count on that goodwill being permanent let alone enshrined in law. A good government, not to put too fine a point on it, was one that persecuted Jews no more than necessary.

If Joseph Stein, who wrote the script for Fiddler on the Roof, had been more attentive to small details of Jewish religious practice, he would not have had a character ask the Rabbi if there was a blessing for the Czar. The rabbi responds that of course there is, since there is a blessing for everything. But in point of fact, there was a blessing for the Czar in the siddurim printed in Imperial Russia, and it even mentioned the Czar and his family by name. Jews were instructed to pray for the welfare of the government under which they lived by Jeremiah during the Babylonian exile: 'Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.' (Jeremiah 29:7).

While Jeremiah instructed his people to pray for the welfare of the city, he did not specify the exact words to be said. The prayer which eventually became the standard prayer for the government with the spread of printing was, ironically, written in the 15th century in Aragon for King Ferdinand -- the same King who subsequently both financed Columbus’ expedition and gave all Jews in his kingdom the choice of conversion or exile. This prayer became known as “HaNoten Teshuah,” meaning “he who grants salvation,” from its first two words.

This prayer originally written for Ferdinand continued virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, except of course for the names of the rulers and their specific titles. For example, a Machzor printed in Vilna contains the following, as translated by Rabbi Robert Scheinberg:

May He Who grants salvation to kings and dominion to rulers,

Whose kingdom is a kingdom spanning all eternity,

Who releases David, his servant, from the evil sword,

Who places a road in the sea and a path in the mighty waters –

May He bless, protect, guard, assist, elevate, exalt, and lift upwards

Our master CZAR NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH,

With his wife, the honorable CZARINA ALEXANDRA FEODOROVNA

Their son, the crown prince ALEXI NIKOLAIOVICH

And his mother, the honorable CZARINA MARIA FEODORAVNA

And the entire house of our king, may their glory be exalted.

May the King of kings in His mercy give him life, and protect him,

And save him from every trouble, woe and injury.

May nations submit under his feet, and may his enemies fall before him,

And may he succeed in whatever he endeavors.

May the King of kings, in His mercy, grant compassion in his heart

and the heart of all his advisors

To do favors for us and for all Israel, our brethren.

In his days and in our days, may Judah be saved, and may Israel dwell securely,

And may the Redeemer come to Zion.

So may it be His will – and we say:  AMEN.

Many Orthodox prayer books continue to use this prayer to this day. Depending on the particular edition of the Artscroll siddur, for example, the prayer is either printed only in Hebrew or not at all, with a notation at the appropriate place in the service that this is the point at which the prayer for the government is said. Now Artscroll publishes many different editions of their Siddur, and it’s possible that there are editions which do have an English translation, but as I said, I haven’t seen it.

If we look at the content, we see that this is a prayer for the government but it isn’t a prayer for the country. There is no mention of the inhabitants of the country other than the ruler and his family and advisors, there is no mention of the welfare of the general society, and there is only one desire expressed for the ruler: to have compassion on, and to do favors for, the Jews. This prayer does not view Jews as citizens of the country or as having anything in common with the other inhabitants. It merely seeks to prove that the Jews are loyal to the authorities and expresses the hope that in return for our loyalty, the rulers will be kind to us.

When Jews first came to this country, the practice of saying HaNoten Teshuah continued unchanged. The first Jews came to what was then New Amsterdam in 1654 and had to appeal to the authorities back in old Amsterdam to be permitted to remain, so naturally the Jews wished to prove their loyalty and of course hope that they wouldn’t be persecuted. The congregation that the first Jews of New Amsterdam founded still exists as Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and today is in its 3rd building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Its archives are a treasure trove of information about early American Jewish life, and they reveal that by at least 1760 this prayer was recited at Shearith Israel in English but the names or titles of the authorities -- by this time including not only the British King but the chief magistrate of the New York council -- were recited in Portuguese, a language which by then few of the congregants could understand.

As historian Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University wrote:  “Within a few years, however, this longtime practice had become a problem for American Jews. It was not just that their loyalties had changed  -- this, after all, was common to many Americans of the day and had in any case been a feature of Jewish life for centuries (causing no end of problems when prayer books extolling a previous sovereign in the text of Hanoten “Teshu'ah had hastily to be withdrawn.) The more vexing problem Jews faced in the wake of the American Revolution was whether the prayer familiar to them from regular use and fixed in their liturgy was appropriate at all in a country where leaders were elected and sovereignty rested with the people.”

There are no records from Shearith Israel or any of the five other Jewish congregations which existed in the United States from during the Revolutionary War, but by 1782 the congregants of Mikve Israel congregation in Philadelphia were praying for "His Excellency the President, and Hon'ble Delegates of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, His Excellency George Washington, Captain General and Commander in Chief of the Federal Army of these States," the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, and "all kings and potentates in alliance with North America." Shortly afterwards, editions of the Siddur printed in the United States began to leave out the name of the President and just used the title, since otherwise it would be necessary to replace all the siddurim every four or eight years. But other than replacing the King with the President, the prayer continued unchanged -- perhaps because traditional congregations -- there were no other kind -- were slow to change, perhaps because the prayer was said in Hebrew which most congregants couldn’t understand anyway.

It wasn’t until 1830 that a Jewish congregation wrote an entirely new prayer, in recognition that a representative democracy is different than a monarchy. That prayer was written in Charleston, S.C. and appeared in the prayer book of the “Reformed Society of Israelites,” the first and rather short-lived attempt at founding a more liberal Jewish congregation. Although the society itself soon disappeared, the attempt opened the floodgates and other new prayers for the government began to appear.

In 1837 Isaac Leeser, the “minister” (he was not an ordained rabbi) of Mikve Israel in Philadelphia issued his siddur with an English translation. Since he hoped to market his work throughout the English-speaking world, he retained the traditional Hebrew “HaNoten Teshua” but offered two different English translations, one for a republican form of government, as he put it, and one for a royal form. The republican version was mostly traditional but removed some of the more flowery and obsequious language used in the royal form. Professor Sarna notes “the symbolic importance of offering two alternative prayers in the liturgy. By distinguishing monarchies and republics as he did, Leeser (perhaps unconsciously) divided the Diaspora into two kinds of polities, implying that they stood differently before God. Everywhere that Leeser's prayer book reached  . . .this dramatic distinction was underscored, reminding Jews who still lived under kings and queens that an alternative form of government existed.”

For 90 years after Leeser, various editions of the prayer book had various attempts at formulating a prayer that would accurately reflect the role of the Jew in our society. Most of these efforts were in prayer books published by the Reform movement; Orthodox congregations were mostly unwilling to change any part of the liturgy while the Conservative movement published no liturgical texts of its own, unwilling thereby to acknowledge that it had definitively broken with Orthodoxy.

In 1927 the United Synagogue published the Festival Prayer Book which was the first siddur or machzor published under Conservative auspices. Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, the outstanding Talmudic scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, was asked to write a completely new prayer for the country. With slight adaptations as language changed, and with a revision that made it appropriate for Canadian as well as American congregations to recite, it remains the prayer which is said in Conservative as well as Reconstructionist congregations to this day.

Let’s take a look at what it says:

Our God and God of our ancestors: We ask Your blessings for our country - for its government, for its leaders and advisors, and for all who exercise just and rightful authority. Teach them insights of Your Torah, that they may administer all affairs of state fairly, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide in our midst.

Creator of all flesh, bless all the inhabitants of our country with Your spirit. May citizens of all races and creeds forge a common bond in true harmony, to banish hatred and bigotry, and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions that are the pride and glory of our country.

May this land, under Your Providence, be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting all people in peace and freedom - and helping them to fulfill the vision of Your prophet: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they experience war any more." And let us say, Amen.

Many of the prayers we say, especially when we say them in Hebrew, are said simply because they are traditional. It gives us comfort to know that we are saying the same words, and in many cases singing the same melodies, that Jews have said and sung for hundreds of years. For example, our siddur and our mahzor have prayers which look forward to a rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of worship there under the kohanim. The musaf service we pray every Shabbat and holiday has this as a central theme, and the Avodah service on Yom Kippur focuses on this in its entirety. Personally, I have my doubts that such an eventuality would be desirable, given the disunity within the Jewish world, the control of religious life and religious sites in Israel by a medieval-minded rabbinic bureaucracy, and so on. But I’m happy to say these prayers nonetheless to connect with my ancestors who said them.

But a specially-written prayer which we say in English is meant, I think, to reflect the values we believe in and the reality we hope to create. Unlike HaNoten Teshua, Ginzberg’s prayer sees American Jews not as “subjects” but as “citizens.” We are connected to our fellow Jews but we’re also connected to our fellow Americans. We don’t ask that the king who rules us make decisions and decrees favorable to the Jews. Rather, we ask that our leaders -- who we elected, and who therefore exercise “just and rightful authority” -- make decisions and enact policies which will bring us peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom. And we want them to do so, using insights from our Torah. We believe, as American Jews, not that the Torah or Judaism should be imposed as the law of the land; but that “insights from our Torah,” Jewish values, can guide the leaders of our country to make it safe and secure, just and peaceful.

In HaNoten Teshua, we are asking God to make the rulers of the country be good to us. Since historically we were not citizens and had no rights, that is the best we could do. HaNoten Teshua mentions only the rulers and not our fellow-inhabitants, since we are not part of the same polity with them, they probably don’t like us, and we’re not too fond of them either. But here it is different. We ask that God help citizens -- not subjects -- of all races and creeds forge a common bond in true harmony. We know from our painful experience that America is different, but it is different precisely because it protects the rights of minorities, whether those minorities are religious or racial. And what insures that America remains different? Not the goodwill of the ruler but “the ideals and free institutions which are the pride and glory of our country.”

We ask God to bless our leaders -- but in a democracy, our leaders are chosen by the

people and reflect the character and desires of the people. May this land, under God’s

providence, continue to be an influence for good throughout the world, and may citizens of

all races and creeds continue to enjoy its blessings. Ken y’hi ratzon.

Rosh Hashana Sermon: Sisera's Mother and Us

The old woman sat at her window, worried. Her son should have returned by now. She peered out through the lattices, and started wailing. “Why is he so late in coming? He should already be back.” The other women present try to comfort her, making up all kinds of excuses as to why her son is delayed. But in her heart, she knows the truth. He’s not coming back. His lifeless body lies somewhere in a ditch, flies buzzing around his eyes, blood on his clothing. She knows that the words her companions speak aren’t true. He’s not coming back, and she begins to wail.

There are many different explanations as to why we blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah we read about the Binding of Isaac, and how a ram was sacrificed instead of Abraham’s son. The shofar is a ram’s horn, and by blowing the shofar we remind God of Abraham’s merit and hope that he will be merciful to us for Abraham’s sake. The shofar is bent, symbolizing our contrition over our sins and failings. In ancient Israel, as throughout the ancient near east, the shofar was used as a battle cry, telling the troops what to do in the heat of the fighting. So Maimonides tells us that the shofar is the battle cry of our soul, rousing us from our spiritual slumber and calling us to fight against the evil inclinations which want us to remain complacent.

But there is another explanation for the shofar with which you may be less familiar. According to the Talmud in Tractate Rosh Hashanah 33b, the sounds of the shofar are supposed to be like those the woman I mentioned a couple of minutes ago made as she looked out the window and realized her son wasn’t coming home. There is no sound in the world that is more pitiful, more broken, than that. If the sound of the shofar is to arouse compassion, there is no sound more appropriate than this.

And who is this woman who sits at the window crying over her lost son? Is it Hannah, the heroic woman who lost seven children in the fight against Antiochus and the Seleucid Empire which gave us Chanukah? Perhaps it is Samson’s mother, waiting for her heroic son to return from fighting the Philistines? But no, the woman who sits at the window and wails, whose pain we reenact as we sound the shofar, is Sisera’s mother. Unless you come to synagogue on the Shabbat when we read the Song at the Sea, and pay attention that morning to the Haftarah, you may well be asking yourself who Sisera was and what his mother has to do with anything. But Sisera is the Canaanite general defeated by the Israelite general Barak and the prophetess Deborah, who was subsequently seduced by the heroine Yael who drove a tent-peg through his forehead while he slept. The bloodthirsty enemy general Sisera, whose well-deserved death meant our ancestors enjoyed peace and quiet for 40 years. But the book of Judges passage which we read as a Haftarah on the Shabbat we read the Song at the Sea reminds us that even brutal bloodthirsty generals have mothers, and that they suffer when their sons are killed.

Rabbi Ed Feld of the Jewish Theological Seminary writes: “what we are to hear is the pain and suffering of the mother of Sisera. . . Make no mistake, the Rabbis are proud of Deborah's victory, she acted to save Israel and did what was required in that hour. And yet, on Rosh Hashanah we are to feel not only the pride of victory but the pain that was caused the mother of our enemy even when we fought in a righteous cause.”

There are times in the Jewish calendar when we are to recall our own pain. Holocaust Remembrance Day, Tisha B’Av, numerous minor fasts that few of us observe such as Tzom Gedaliah, the 17th of Tammuz and the Tenth of Tevet. But on Rosh Hashanah, the Talmud wants to remind us, that if we are to get God’s attention and motivate God to have mercy on us, we need to recall not our pain but someone else’s. Our suffering is not a “get out of jail free” card and we are not exempt from having empathy for others -- even the mother of the bloodthirsty enemy general.

If you were raised in a Jewish family, chances are that some of your earliest Jewish memories are of the Passover seder. When we come to the ten plagues we spill a drop of wine at the mention of each plague. Why? Because our joy at our own deliverance is tempered by our recollection of the sufferings of the Egyptians. And in so doing, we’re reminded of the Midrash that God prevented the angels from rejoicing at the parting of the Red Sea, saying “my creatures (the Egyptian soldiers) are drowning in the sea, this is not a time to sing songs of praise.” The idea that we should have empathy for others, even our enemies, is ingrained in us from an early age.

As Steven Covey wrote in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Covey says that most of us don’t do that.  “Most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand. You listen to yourself as you prepare in your mind what you are going to say, the questions you are going to ask, etc. You filter everything you hear through your life experiences, your frame of reference. You check what you hear against your autobiography and see how it measures up. And consequently, you decide prematurely what the other person means before he/she finishes communicating.” We can’t have empathy without listening, truly listening, to others. Listening not to sharpen our rebuttal, but truly hearing the other person, including their pain. Our digital age has made it easier to listen to people who are not like us, since their tweets and blogs and Youtube videos are so easily accessible. But our digital age has also made real listening increasingly rare, both because of our diminished attention span and our ability to create digital bubbles so that rarely if ever are we confronted with perspectives which challenge us. It isn’t even a question of agreeing or disagreeing. Just listen to another person and their experiences.

The shooting deaths or deaths in police custody of African-Americans like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher and Philando Castile galvanized a movement known as “Black Lives Matter.” Some have criticized the movement, saying “All Lives Matter.” And of course, all lives do matter. But when the American Jewish community in the 1970s and 1980s organized under the banner of “Save Soviet Jewry,” were we saying that only Jewish lives matter? When activists organize under the banner of “Save the Whales” is the unspoken corollary “and to heck with the dolphins and the seals?” But the fact is that for much of our country’s history, Black lives did not matter.

I confess that for a long time when asked to give my racial information I either checked “other” or declined to answer. When somebody would use the phrase “white privilege” I would bristle. My grandparents came here almost penniless. They struggled to learn a new language in a culture where antisemitism was widespread. Not a single one of my ancestors lived in this country when African Americans were slaves. While my ancestors in Eastern Europe weren’t owned as chattel, their lives were not a whole lot better. In Israel, I visited with relatives who had survived concentration camps and others who spent all of World War II hiding in the woods. What kind of privilege is that?

But the reality is that African Americans have a very different experience of the police than white people do. I first learned this in the early 90s when I had jury duty in DC superior court. It was a cocaine possession case and there were 7 blacks and 5 whites on the jury. I was chosen by the jurors as foreman and I decided that before we even deliberated we ought to take a vote. Our first straw poll was 7 to acquit and 5 to convict. All 7 blacks found the defense claim that the police detained the wrong man and then planted drugs on him to cover up their mistake to be credible. At first, none of the whites thought this was remotely possible, because it’s so far outside of our experience. While the first vote divided along racial lines, it would not be fair to say that the blacks on the jury were motivated solely by race. After all, they had elected me as foreman -- but they simply had a different experience of the police in their neighborhoods than I had, living in Cleveland Park.

A couple of years ago the Montgomery County Police came to my home due to a misunderstanding and I was furious. I refused to let them into the house until a supervisor was called. I failed to comply with their orders, I stomped around in my driveway and I was not polite. It never for a moment occurred to me that my failure to comply could get me killed.

The fact that I did something incredibly stupid and potentially life-threatening only dawned on me a couple of weeks later when I saw a video of the arrest -- which ended in his death -- of Eric Garner. If you recall, Garner was at the time of his death in July 2014, 44 years old. He was a big man, 6 foot 3 and close to 400 pounds. He was arrested on suspicion of selling untaxed loose cigarettes, and when the police tried to handcuff him he said that he was tired of being harassed and pulled his hands away. One of the officers put him in a chokehold and he soon died.

When I watched the video of Eric Garner I saw myself on that afternoon a few weeks earlier. I recognized the frustration and anger he was feeling. He wasn’t threatening or violent, he was just fed up. Maybe he was breaking the law by selling untaxed cigarettes, maybe not, but he didn't deserve to die. Watching Eric Garner, I wondered in retrospect what would have happened to me if I had done exactly what I did under different circumstances or in a different place. If one of the officers who came to my house didn’t already know that I was the rabbi of the synagogue around the corner? If I lived in a less-affluent part of Montgomery Village? If my skin had been black?

My parents never felt that they had to warn me to always be polite if stopped by the police and to always keep my hands in sight. Is the same true of black parents in our country? When I demanded the officers call their commander to the scene, guess what they did. They did so rather than arresting me, or worse. My white skin allowed me the “privilege” of being angry and fed up when the police appeared and to be utterly oblivious -- at the time -- to the fact that people pay with their lives for doing what I did.

Saying the words “Black Lives Matter” has become more difficult for Jews in recent weeks as some elements of that movement have embraced the idea of boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel and have labeled Israel a colonialist, apartheid state. It’s also difficult, unfortunately, because so many people imagine that if you are concerned about unarmed black men and women being killed by police or dying in police custody, you are somehow anti-police.

Yet, it seems to me that we can have empathy both for the African-American mother who worries that her son’s skin color casts him under suspicion as well as for the mother of the police officer who knows that every day he goes off to work could be his last.I’m not talking about policy or laws here. It’s not my area of expertise. I’m talking about hearing another person’s pain and not minimizing it.  And I hasten to add that here in Montgomery County we have a fantastic police department. I’ve been in meetings with Chief Manger and Assistant Chief McSwain, and I’ve met patrol officers including those who protect our synagogue and always step up their vigilance whenever there are heightened tensions. I’ve not met a single member of the Montgomery County Police who was less than impressive.

Empathy literally means the ability to understand the feelings of others. That should be simple but it isn’t. It takes an act of imagination, to realize that my experiences are not universal and my frame of reference isn’t the only one. It means asking myself, not “how do I feel about this?” but rather “how would I feel about this if I were the other person? What would it be like to walk a mile in that other person’s shoes?”

I’ve focused so far on the Black experience of the criminal justice system only because for me, watching the video of Eric Garner’s death was a real eye opener. I could have chosen to discuss any of a number of other groups in our society who feel marginalized. Gays and lesbians and especially transgender people; Muslim Americans who are feeling very vulnerable and even Sikh Americans, who are not Muslims yet often fall victim to prejudice and even physical violence because Sikh men wear turbans and have beards and are thus often mistaken for Muslims.

You can also be part of the majority and still feel marginalized. Bruce Springsteen said recently “there's a price being paid for not addressing the real cost of the deindustrialization and globalization that has occurred in the United States for the past 35, 40 years and how it’s deeply affected people's lives and deeply hurt people.” White working class people are losing ground, particularly those who are over 50, those who don’t have a college degree, those working in industries which have declined and aren’t coming back like coal and steel and textile manufacturing. There are a lot of people in this country who are bewildered by the societal and economic changes which have taken place in their lifetime, they are angry and they feel that no one is listening and no one cares about them.

Can we care about unarmed black men and women who are killed by police and also care about police and their families? Can we care about members of racial and ethnic minorities and also care about poor whites who feel that the America they once knew is no more and that their future is bleak? Can we care about LGBT Americans and also have empathy for those who are sincerely bewildered that what once was unthinkable is now perfectly acceptable? Can we care about our Muslim fellow-Americans and also care about Israel and about our soldiers who risk their lives to keep us safe from those who seek to do us harm, many of whom wrap themselves in the mantle of Islam?

On Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar whose sounds remind us of the grief of a mother who has lost her son. On Yom Kippur during the Al Chet and Ashamnu prayers we will strike our chests over our hearts, symbolically opening our hearts as if we were opening a hole in a wall. If we can embrace the pain of Sisera’s mother, we should be able to embrace the pain of our neighbors who are not like us. My plea to you on this holy day is to do just that. Take the time to listen with an open heart to someone who isn’t like you.

To quote the famous poem of Edwin Markham:

“He drew a circle that shut me out-

Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle and took him In !”

Or if you prefer, the teaching found in Avot d’Rabbi Natan: “Who is a hero? The one who turns an enemy into a friend.” In the coming year, may we achieve the heroism of doing just that.

Technology and the High Holidays

  Neil Postman was a professor of education at New York University. He published his last book, Building A Bridge to the 18th Century, in 1999 and passed away in 2003. Some of his works are considered classics in the field of education and I recall reading him in graduate school in the early 1980s.

          Postman was known as something of a skeptic concerning technology and maintained in his final book that many technologies are being created to solve problems which don’t exist. For example, he wrote (in 1999) that Bill Gates was working on a technology “that would make obsolete the task of locating and then sending recordings into action.  One approaches the machinery and speaks the words "Frank Sinatra" or "Pavarotti" or, if you can imagine it, "'The Spice Girls," and we hear them. May one ask, What is the problem solved by this? The answer, I am told, is speed. We are a people who measure our lives in seconds. Five seconds saved here, five seconds there, and at the end of the day, we have perhaps saved a minute. By year's end, we have saved over five hours. At death's door, we may allow ourselves a smile by gasping that we saved a month and a half, and no one will ask, But for what?”

          As a matter of fact, the technological innovation decried by Postman in 1999 now sits on the counter which divides our kitchen from our den, albeit not invented by Bill Gates and not manufactured or sold by Microsoft. It’s called the Amazon Echo and it will play music by a particular artist, in a particular genre or even a specific song upon request. It does quite a bit more than that as well. While Postman attributed the quest to develop this technology to a desire to save time, it seems to me that its main virtues are rather saving space and resources. If I buy an album or an individual song as an electronic file rather than on a CD or phonograph album (remember those?) it does not take up storage space in my home. It does not require whatever raw materials went into its manufacture nor the emission of carbons to deliver it.

          Keleigh and I also both have Kindle E-readers, and as a result we rarely purchase physical books. Since we are both voracious readers, our book collections were literally consuming all the available wall space in our previous home as well as being stacked on floors and tables and piled in boxes in our basement. The advent of the Kindle has let us keep up with our reading without being engulfed by mountains of books.

          Of course there are downsides as well. Digital technology has changed the music business and it’s much harder to make a living as a musician unless you hit it big. (The Amazon Echo actually is better in this regard than MP3 players, because it doesn’t play pirated or illegally-shared files.) E-readers and Amazon have lead to the closing of the Borders bookstore chain as well as many local, independent booksellers.

          Postman was not calling for a moratorium on technology but rather reminding us that while it has benefits, there are costs as well. He posed an important question: “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?“

          Technology is not going away, and in our religious school we have harnessed it to provide what I firmly believe is a better education and a better experience than was provided before. A balanced approach is called for. But as the High Holidays approach, Postman’s questions still echo. Who benefits and who is harmed? And most importantly, what are we going to do with the time we save?

Thoughts the Morning After Seeing a Bruce Springsteen Concert

If you see me this evening and I am a bit groggy, it is because Keleigh and I got home at 1:45 this morning from the Bruce Springsteen concert at Nationals Park. Bruce Springsteen’s music has been part of the soundtrack of my life. His high school was 15 miles from mine (although I am ten years younger than he is). I was vaguely aware of him even when I was in elementary school as there was a riot after a performance by his band Steel Mill at a nearby swim club. Some of the locales he mentions in his lyrics, like Madame Marie’s, Kingsley Ave. or Highway 9, are very familiar to me, and when I was in high school and he already had two albums out, I ran into him in the sporting goods department of K-Mart.

But it has been a long time since I had last seen a Bruce Springsteen performance. I’d seen him twice at the old Capital Center, once in an acoustic performance at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles when I was living there, and a couple of times at unannounced performances at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park and Big Man’s East in Red Bank. The power of a Springsteen performance is not just in the musicianship but in the stories he tells through his lyrics. The characters who populate his songs are very specific but also universal. People who have been beaten down by life but not broken. They either walk tall or don’t walk at all. They tell their boss “I’m not a boy, no, I’m a man  . . . and I believe in the promised land.”

In this week’s Parasha we are reminded more than once that we were slaves in Egypt, and that therefore we are to act with compassion towards those who have less than we do. If someone becomes poor, we are to provide them with whatever they need -- which the sages tell us means that we’re responsible not only for their subsistence but for their dignity as well. We are to have empathy for others and put ourselves in their place,to imagine what it would be like if we were they. Springsteen in his songs plays a role similar to that played by Nathan the Prophet in King David’s court.

Last night was the first time I heard Springsteen perform “American Skin (41 Shots).” This song was inspired by the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York City. Plainclothes police officers mistook him for a suspect they were after. He reached for his wallet to show the police he was not the man they were looking for, one of the officers thought it was a gun, and 41 shots later Amadou Diallo was dead.

When the song first came out, the New York City police union called on the public to boycott Springsteen’s performances. This pattern is so familiar in our society where so many people want to see things as cut-and-dry, binary. If you are concerned about African-American men being killed by police, you are anti-cop. But it shows a fundamental misunderstanding.

In the song, a (presumably African-American) mother has “the talk” with her son Charles (yes, that is his name.)

She says, "On these streets, Charles

You've got to understand the rules

If an officer stops you

Promise me you'll always be polite

And that you'll never ever run away

Promise Mama you'll keep your hands in sight"

But that isn’t the only story Springsteen tells. The refrain of the song is as follows:

Well, is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life.

It ain’t no secret, no secret my friend;

You can get killed just for living,

In your American Skin.

Who is speaking these words? It’s somewhat ambiguous but it seems to me that the speaker here is the police officer who has to make a split-second decision. If he makes the wrong decision someone could get killed -- maybe him, maybe the suspect. I’m thankful my job doesn’t carry those kinds of stakes on a regular basis.

Springsteen wants us to put ourselves in the shoes of all these characters. The mom who knows that her son’s skin color instantly makes him a suspect; the young man who doesn’t understand why that should be and why he has to follow different rules than his white classmates; the police officer who goes to work every day knowing that he might come home in a coffin; and the police officer’s family who never really sleeps while their loved one is at work.

If we can’t see ourselves in all these people, we’re flunking the empathy test and falling short of the standards the Torah sets for us.

Walls, Spies, and American Jews

A friend and congregant has been sitting shiva for his mother and there have been minyanim (prayer services) at his house both morning and evening. I want to share with you a Torah thought I had yesterday morning connecting the weekly Torah reading to the secular calendar.

This week’s parasha, Shelach, begins with the story of the Twelve Spies Moses sent shortly after the Exodus to scout out the Land of Israel. Ten of the twelve tell Moses upon their return that it will be impossible to conquer the Land because the inhabitants are too strong. How do they know? Because their cities are surrounded by big tall walls.

Rashi points out that the spies got it backwards. Heavily fortified cities do not mean strong people. They mean weak people, fearful people. Strong people don’t need to hide behind walls.

We have been having our morning minyan services in Jedd’s backyard, which is visible from two streets and of course to all the neighbors. And yet we are out their davening wearing tallit and tefillin, which look pretty odd to those who aren’t familiar with them. Throughout most of Jewish history -- even in America until fairly recently -- Jews in the Diaspora would have been too afraid to pray with tallit and tefillin in such a visible manner. But because as American Jews we are not fearful, we do not feel the need to hide ourselves behind a wall.

Because I’m a student of Jewish history, I realize how utterly amazing this is. Throughout most of our history we would never have dreamed of something like this. If Jews would have been comfortable praying outdoors in a residential area, it would have only been because Jews lived segregated from the rest of the population. But we are blessed to live in a country which believes in and practices religious freedom. We live in a country which allowed us or our parents or grandparents to come here and thrive even though they didn’t speak the language and had a different religion than almost everyone else.

On this July 4th weekend let’s give thanks for the blessings of freedom we enjoy in this country.