Yom Kippur Day Sermon

Yom Kippur Day Sermon 5773

Kehilat Shalom, Gaithersburg, MD

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

Two construction workers sat down together to have lunch at their job site. The first worker reached into his lunch box and pulled out a sandwich. He took a bite, spit it out with disgust, and said, “Yecch, ham on white bread.” He reached into the lunch box again and took out a second sandwich. He bit into that one, again spit it out and said, “Blecch, turkey on whole wheat.”

The second construction worker said to him: “you know, if you hate what you have for lunch so much, why don’t you speak to your wife and ask her to make you something different?”
“My wife?” the first construction worker said. “I made these myself.”

About a hundred years ago there was a rabbi in Warsaw named Yehuda Leib Alter. He was the rebbe of the Gerer Hasidim and he wrote a Torah commentary known as the Sfas Emes, which means “The Language of Truth.” My friend Rabbi Steve Sager of Durham, NC, got me interested in reading the Sfas Emes a number of years ago. Rabbi Sager called the Sfas Emes “the first post-modern Jewish theologian” and he was right. The Sfas Emes had a unique ability to penetrate to the heart of the Torah and help us understand how it speaks to every Jew.
The Sfas Emes, in his commentary on Exodus, asks an interesting question. What did the generation which left Egypt do to merit redemption? After all, they were, when it comes down to it, not such righteous people. They rebelled against Moses, several times, tried to overthrow him and tried to return to Egypt. No less astonishingly, after witnessing God’s power both at the Red Sea and at Sinai, they committed the sin of the Golden Calf. So, how is it that they merited redemption?
The answer, the Sfas Emes teaches us, is quite simple. Prior to the generation that left Egypt, the Torah does record that the Hebrew slaves complained about their lot. But, they never asked to go free. As soon as the people asked to go free, God freed them.
The point is not some arbitrary insistence by God that the people ask for freedom, like a five year old that won’t lend out his toy until his friend “asks nicely.” No, the point is that the first step on the road to freedom is to imagine that freedom is actually possible. It’s not enough to know that you don’t like the current situation. Or, to go back to our construction workers, it’s not enough to know that you don’t like ham on white or turkey on whole wheat. The point is, you have to imagine a different possibility. Many people lack the hope that things could be different. That hope, I believe, is a gift of God, if we choose to accept it; it is the gift of teshuvah, of transformation.

Several years ago when we lived in Baltimore, I read an article in a local monthly, The Urbanite,  which made this point quite eloquently. I do not know if the author, Kelly Parisi, is Jewish, or if she has any religious identification at all. I do know that what she wrote reflects a sensibility, which is deeply consonant with the message of our High Holiday prayers.
Kelly Parisi was 38 years old when her 42-year-old husband died of cancer. She writes: “the experience purged me like a fire . . . For the first time I understood ownership was an illusion. Nothing belonged to me – not the people I loved, not my own life. Everything was on loan, due date unknown.”
A few months after her husband’s death, she made a life-changing decision “one night in the grocery store after a few months of widowhood. Wandering the aisle, my basket bone empty, it dawned on me that I couldn’t remember what I liked to eat. I stood there looking at various foods and asking myself, do I like that? And I really didn’t know. I had been caring for my husband for so long, thinking about only what he could eat, that drinking a can of Boost and calling it a day had become good enough for me.”
“Confused and a little desperate, I bought three bags of Oreos, drove to Baskin-Robbins, ordered a chocolate malt and sat in the car taking stock. Gone was more than my appetite. I had lost my future and my dreams. At 38 years old, a friend had referred to me as “middle-aged and widowed.” Sometimes I felt a hundred years old, yet sitting alone in a parking lot at 9 p.m., eating cookies and drinking a malted milkshake just because I could, made me feel downright juvenile. I vowed to continue.”
“The Oreo diet worked wonders. After a few months I added Cheerios, olives, kiwi, and tuna. If it didn’t end in a vowel, I didn’t eat it. True, it was an eccentric sort of self-care, strange, intuitive and absurd, yet unquestionably correct. Slowly, one sweet choice at a time, I reconstructed my life.” She writes that she ultimately decided to give up her career as a graphic designer to go back to school and pursue a master’s degree in her true passion, creative writing.

The point is not that we should all give up our well-paying careers and pursue our passions. Kelly Parisi doesn’t mention having kids, so I guess she doesn’t, which no doubt made it easier for her to go back to school full-time at the age of 40. The point is rather that after reaching bottom, she realized that things could be different. It was the realization that she did not have to keep doing the same thing over and over, that she was not a prisoner of the past, which allowed her to rebuild her life and move in a different direction.

The challenges and disruptions we face at Kehilat Shalom are not as great as those faced by Kelly Parisi, but we too face the choice of being prisoners of the past or moving in a new, more positive, direction.

On Rosh Hashanah I quoted a provocative article by Rabbi Irwin Kula, co-president of CLAL: the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which appeared in the Huffington Post. In his article “From the Cathedral to the Bazaar,” Rabbi Kula wrote that “the existing business models and organizational structures of mainstream religion are, as in many fields of meaning-making today (journalism, film, and music), increasingly unsustainable. Fewer and fewer Americans are getting religion in the cathedrals. They are getting what they need to get their spiritual/meaning-making job done in the bazaar, which has a very different model of authority and hierarchy, has very limited barriers of entry and far more choices, and which tends to be a user-friendly and open source environment.”

I want to explore that statement a little bit and what its implications are for us as we ponder our future. The comparisons to journalism, film, and music are apt. They are all, as Rabbi Kula puts it, fields of “meaning-making.” They help us make sense of our lives and sustain us through our times of joy and sorrow. And all of these fields are going through a radical restructuring.

People are still interested in music, but the advent of the Internet, mp3 players and file-sharing means that people, certainly people younger than I, no longer buy CDs.  Tower Records and Borders are out of business and Sam Goody became FYE and makes its money mostly from video games. So musicians and producers need to figure out new ways of still being paid for the music they create, and music retailers have to figure out how to stay in business. But it would be a mistake to think the financial realignment of the music industry means people aren’t interested in listening to or creating music anymore.

The same for journalism. People are certainly still interested in news. But the rise of 24 hour cable networks and the Internet have meant fewer people rely on the daily newspaper as their main source of news. We lived here six weeks before we even subscribed to a newspaper, which we get as much for the comics and the crossword as for the news. Because my primary source of news is Google news which I look at every morning as soon as I wake up.

Film, too, faces economic challenges. Fewer and fewer people see films in movie theaters; more and more see them at home as DVDS -- bought, rented, or pirated -- or “On Demand” through their cable or satellite tv service. The advent of Youtube and other similar services have made it easier for a filmmaker to get known, but how do you make money off of someone watching your movie on Youtube? Youtube has started experimenting with pay per view options but it remains to be seen how this will work out.

Which brings us to the business model of the synagogue, which is actually not very different than that of most churches. A family chooses to join a congregation based on whatever factors make sense to them. The location is convenient, they like the clergy, they like the building, they agree with its ideology, their friends are members there, it confers status, they like the religious school. There is a difference between synagogues and churches in that synagogues have annual dues while churches have an offering on Sunday. But the difference looms larger to Jews than it actually is. Most churches set an expected level of annual giving which generally is not too different than what synagogues charge in dues, and they manage to keep track. It’s not, contrary to what you may believe, a question of putting a buck or two in the collection plate; families pledge an annual amount that is generally based on their income. The main difference is that synagogues tend to have a fixed amount per family, though of course those who can afford more often give more and those who can’t afford full dues can ask for an abatement, whereas in churches each family decides for itself what it will give based on its income and church guidelines. But a recent survey conducted by the Forward newspaper shows that churches and synagogues of similar demographics tend to raise almost identical amounts of money per capita from their members in either dues or annual giving. Indeed, church members generally give a little bit more per family than synagogue members.

As I’ve already indicated, one of the necessary ingredients in any attempt at change is the belief that change is possible. This is especially difficult in the case of synagogues as there is an unspoken assumption that the synagogue as it exists today is what has “always” been. But in fact, the American synagogue does not resemble what existed in “the old country”, wherever that was, nor do today’s synagogues much resemble those which existed 100 years ago.

The earliest stage of the American synagogue was the immigrant synagogue. It simply transplanted what had been known in the Old Country. The institution was pretty much the same. It was an island of familiarity in a sea of strangeness.

          Stage two is called by historians the “ethnic synagogue.” It was made up mostly of the children of immigrants and it played a dual role. It was a place of ethnic solidarity but it was also a vehicle for Americanization. Sermons were in English rather than in Yiddish, and prayers were said in English as well as in Hebrew. Thus, the synagogue was an Americanized and Americanizing institution while still being a place of ethnic identity and solidarity.

          Stage three is the synagogue-center, starting generally in the years shortly after the Second World War. Jews had arrived; they were increasingly accepted in general society as anti-Semitism, while not disappearing, decreased significantly. They were more prosperous than before. Religiously, Judaism was increasingly accepted as one of the “three major faiths” and no important civic ceremony could be held without a rabbi as well as a priest and minister to give the invocation or benediction. While immigrant and even ethnic synagogues tended to be modest buildings, stage three synagogues were larger and were usually located in prominent, visible locations. They were meant to make a statement to Jew and Gentile alike about Jewish prosperity, permanence, and being a proud part of the American mix. They were much more than just shuls; they were centers of culture, of education, and a social center for the Jewish commmunity. As a rule, the space devoted to social and educational activities was much larger than that devoted to prayer. Synagogue-centers were also, largely, child-focused. Adults dropped their kids off for Hebrew school or youth group, but aside from High Holiday services rarely went inside themselves, except for family services and life cycle events in which their kids or their friend’s kids were taking part. And for the most part, worship was pretty passive. The rabbi called the pages, led the English readings, and gave the sermon. The cantor sang and taught the boys their Bar Mitzvah portions. Usually, both of them wore clerical robes. There were few opportunities for men to participate actively in leading services, and no opportunities at all for women to do so, except on Sisterhood Sabbath when they might lead the Friday night service.

The fourth stage of the American synagogue is known as the “synagogue community.” It differs from the “synagogue center” in that it is less formal, more diverse, more participatory and more focused on social action. Kehilat Shalom is very much a synagogue community. But in its organizational and financial structure it is quite traditional. It is a membership-based organization with dues and a board and a building and so on.

As I’ve shown in my talk on Rosh Hashanah, even the synagogue community will probably be less and less viable over the coming years and decades. As more and more of us have multiple identities, the idea that one particular place of worship is going to be someone’s main spiritual home, and in order to have that spiritual home he or she is expected to fork over two thousand dollars a year plus a building fund pledge -- that idea is going to be harder and harder to sell. Whatever our new business model will be, it will have to figure out a way to serve those who may wish to dabble in Judaism while also exploring other spiritual traditions. It will have to figure out a way to welcome those who consider themselves part Jewish or somewhat Jewish or “Jew-ish”. These folks will be happy to support the institution, just as people expect to pay for the yoga classes and Reiki treatments and meditation courses they take. Our model is going to have to be much more “pay as you go” and less dues-dependent, as many of the people the synagogue serves may not even be members. Of course there will always be the possibility that some of these dabblers and blenders and benders may ultimately choose Judaism as their sole spiritual path and wish to become members, but if that is presented up front as the direction in which we want people to move, we are going to fail. The goal will have to be providing ways for people to make their lives more meaningful, not convincing people to join our synagogue.

Clearly we face challenges as a community. Some of them are of our own making, but many are not. We cannot change the demographic realities of Montgomery Village or the sociological realities of American society as a whole. But we can bemoan them and become prisoners of them, or we can respond to them in bold and creative ways.

The Piaseczna Rebbe, known as the “Esh Kodesh” or “Sacred Fire”, was the Chasidic rabbi of Warsaw before and during the Holocaust. He tells a story which illustrates the point I am trying to make. It is the story of a beggar who had a dream that he would become a king. Now you must understand that in Chasidic stories dreams are of tremendous significance, because they are God’s way of communicating with us. Now most of us, if we dreamed that we would soon become a king, would be pleased. But this beggar was sorely troubled, scared, and pleaded with God not to make him a king. Why was the beggar so afraid of fulfilling his destiny?
This is why the beggar was so terrified. He said to himself, “As it is, it is all that I can do to knock on enough doors in a day to beg enough money to feed myself, my wife, and my two children. If I become a king, I will now be responsible for the welfare of thousands and thousands of people. How in the world will I ever be able to knock on enough doors to beg enough money to take care of so many?”

You see, the beggar in our story was such a prisoner of “the way things are” that he could not imagine a world in which he did not have to go from door to door to beg for his sustenance. The only difference between his current situation and being a king was that he would simply have to knock on more doors.

The main theme of this period of the year is “teshuva.” It is such a rich word because it has so many meanings. Repentance, yes. Turning, returning, changing, and even answering. And let me suggest another word: response – indeed, the type of Jewish legal writing known in Hebrew as a “teshuva” is called in English a “responsum.” The shofar call can startle us, can wake us up, and can rouse us from our slumber – if we will let it. Will we, like the beggar in the Piaseczna rebbe’s story, be prisoners of a world we imagine could not be any different than it is today? Or will we, like Kelly Parisi, respond to life’s challenges in bold and creative ways? The choice is ours alone. Shana tova.

Rosh Hashana Day I Sermon

Rosh Hashanah Sermon I

Kehilat Shalom

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

At least two daughters of former presidents have married Jewish men -- Chelsea Clinton and Caroline Kennedy. The contrast between the two weddings which took place 24 years apart, helps to illustrate some important changes in American life.

Two summers ago, like many others in the American Jewish community, I  wondered what Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to Marc Mezvinsky  would look like. Since access was tightly controlled, the only photographs of the wedding which were ultimately released are those the couple or their parents wanted seen. And what they chose to reveal was quite interesting. Here are Marc and Chelsea walking arm-in-arm up the aisle. She is in her Vera Wang strapless gown; he is in his Burberry tuxedo, over which is wrapped a white silk tallis with gold stripes. She of course is wearing a veil; he is wearing a black velvet kippah.

And here is another picture, the bride and groom facing each other under the chuppah, their ketubah framed and mounted on a stand for all the world to see.

Chelsea’s wedding could not have been more different than Caroline Kennedy’s 1986 wedding to Edwin Schlossberg. Although he did not convert, Kennedy and Schlossberg were married in a church, with a Roman Catholic priest conducting the Catholic ceremony. No kippah, no tallit, no ketubah, no rabbi.  The price of marrying into the Kennedy family was not necessarily becoming Catholic, but it was clear that Catholicism was to be the religion of the household and that any children would be raised in the Church.

By contrast, Clinton and Mezvinsky were married in an interfaith ceremony that had a lot of Jewish symbolism. A rabbi and a United Methodist minister officiated. There were the tallit and the yarmulke and the ketubah I already mentioned. Friends and relatives read the sheva berachot, the seven blessings which are part of the Jewish wedding ceremony; and the ceremony ended with the groom smashing a glass under his foot and those in attendance shouting “mazal tov.”

None of this was really surprising. When Chelsea and Marc were dating but not yet engaged, they had attended High Holiday services together at the Jewish Theological Seminary.  Moreover, the Clinton family is known to have positive feelings for Jews and Judaism. During his presidency, they had attended High Holiday services on Martha’s Vineyard. President Clinton had many Jews in his administration, and many of them were quite serious about their Judaism: Daniel Kurtzer, Jack Lew, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Rahm Emanuel. It was Bill Clinton who gave the main eulogy at the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; Clinton’s phrase after Rabin’s murder, “Shalom, Chaver,” became a popular bumper sticker in Israel and the name of both a memorial book and a memorial CD. It was clear that the Clintons have no problem with Jews or Judaism, and while Chelsea has not converted, nor has the couple made any statements about how they plan to raise any children they might have -- nor would I expect them to -- it would not surprise anyone to see Zaidy Bill and Bubby Hillary participate in a grandchild’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah fifteen or so years down the road.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding marks a shift in the acceptance of Jews and Judaism as part of American society. Particularly because the visual images coming out of the wedding were so controlled, it is safe to assume that the message we received is the message the couple and their parents wanted to send. Marc Mezvinsky in kippah and tallit, standing under the chuppah near his ketubah, is sending us a message. Yes, I am marrying this Protestant woman, but I am still very much a Jew. My Jewish identity matters to me and on my wedding day I choose to emphasize that this is who I am. And the Clintons are sending a message as well, a message of acceptance and embrace of Marc’s Jewishness and, if the wedding sets a tone for the couple’s life together, a strong measure of Jewish identity in the home and, presumably, in the lives and identities of any future grandchildren.

What I personally found surprising about the Clinton - Mezvinsky wedding was the identity of the rabbi who participated, and the fact that he chose to do so also says something about the nature of Jewish identity today.

Rabbi James Ponet is the Hillel rabbi at Yale University, and he has held that position since 1981. I don’t know him well, but I do know him, since for eight years in the late 80’s to mid-90’s I was also a Hillel rabbi and I would see him every year at our staff conference and other professional meetings.

In the world of Hillel denominational affiliation doesn’t matter very much, and at the two different schools where I was the Hillel director -- the University of Virginia and American University -- I often had graduate or law students who had done their undergraduate work at Yale. When they would discuss their time at Yale Hillel, very few knew that Rabbi Ponet was at least on paper a Reform rabbi. Most would describe him as Conservative, some as Orthodox, because his observance was pretty traditional. In fact, after his ordination from the Reform rabbinical school in 1973, he spent eight years in Israel, where he studied and taught in liberal Orthodox settings like the Pardes yeshiva and the Shalom Hartman Institute, and helped to found one of the more liberal Orthodox synagogues in Jerusalem. After eight years in Israel as part of Jerusalem’s liberal Orthodox community, he came back to the US in 1981 to take the Hillel position at Yale, where he had been an undergraduate.

As you know, Conservative rabbis are forbidden by our professional association to officiate at a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. It is not my purpose today to either defend or criticize that policy, which I am obligated to follow and which is not likely to be changed any time soon. But as a rule rabbis whose constituents regularly assume them to be either Orthodox or Conservative do not co-officiate at intermarriages, with a Christian minister, on Shabbat. So you can imagine why as pleased as I was by all the Jewish symbolism in the Clinton - Mezvinsky wedding, I was surprised that Rabbi Ponet was the rabbi involved. Although unlike many of his students I knew that he was officially affiliated with the Reform movement, I also knew him to be a very traditionally observant Jew.

What I did not know until a couple of days later, when the New York Times ran a profile of Rabbi Ponet, was that over the last seven years or so he has been, as the newspaper put it, on a spiritual journey. “The yarmulke disappeared; he could be heard joking about eating shellfish again, as he had in his youth. Did he get less observant? “In the public eye,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that in the private eye. I still consider Shabbat” — the Sabbath — “the pivot of my life.” While he once counseled against intermarriage, for the last five years or so he has, on occasion, officiated at them.

As we will see, in changing at least the outward manifestations of his Jewish observance, Rabbi Ponet is hardly unique. All of us are on spiritual journeys and there is no guarantee that a year from now, any one of us will be precisely at the same point as we are today. We may believe differently, we may behave differently. Some of the mitzvot we now observe may lose their luster; other mitzvot which today seem devoid of meaning or simply impractical may suddenly seem full of potential to enhance our lives and deepen our relationship to God.

As many of you know, two years ago I was awarded a fellowship by CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, to be one of 20 rabbis -- chosen from over 80 who applied -- to participate in their “Rabbis Without Borders” program. The goal of the program, according to CLAL, is to “nurture and develop a network of rabbis with a shared vision to make Jewish wisdom available to anyone looking to enrich his or her life. We provide rabbis and rabbinical students with cutting edge methodologies for addressing the challenges people face today.”

At our first meeting in October 2010 we studied with Barry Kosmin, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford and one of the leading experts in the sociology of American religion. One of the items we studied with him was a Pew Forum report he co-authored called “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the US.”

There are trends going on in American religious life which we need to understand if we are going to make sense of the world in which we live. We need to understand them while we, as a congregation, ponder our future direction. Those of us who are parents or grandparents need to understand them as we watch our children and grandchildren make decisions about their own lives, decisions we may not necessarily approve of or even understand but decisions we will have to learn to accommodate nonetheless.

The key finding of the Pew Report is that 44% of all Americans do not currently follow the religion in which they are raised.  Of the 56% who do follow the religion in which they were raised, 16% had at one time left it for a different one but then returned. That 16% of the 56% makes up a total of 9% of the overall population -- which means that 53% of all Americans have at one time or another left their original religion.  Many Americans have switched religions more than once.
It’s not just a question of people leaving one religion for another, however. The quickest growing category in the American religious landscape is unaffiliated or “none.” While only 7% of American adults say they were raised without any particular religious affiliation, 16% of the American population is currently unaffiliated. They are now the third largest religious grouping in America after Catholics and Baptists. Many of these “nones” say they believe in God and many observe various religious practices and ceremonies. They just do so without formally joining a church, synagogue or mosque. You probably have friends or relatives who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and they may fall into this category as well.

Rabbi Irwin Kula of CLAL, himself a Conservative rabbi, wrote an interesting article in the Huffington Post about the Clinton - Mezvinsky wedding and what it says about the changing American religious landscape.

“Welcome to the new world of religion in America,” writes Rabbi Kula.  “Chelsea's parents were an interdenominational marriage of a social justice Methodist and a Baptist, which would have been unheard of 50 years ago. Chelsea grew up proudly within mainstream Protestantism, while Marc was raised clearly identified in a mainstream Jewish denomination. Their marriage is the next generational step in crossing borders -- from Methodist-Baptist to Christian-Jew. What is unprecedented -- wonderful for some and horrifying to others -- is that in this era no one needs to reject his or her identity to cross these century-old boundaries. Multiple identities -- in the example of the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, at least three different traditions being brought to bear -- is the new reality.”

Rabbi Kula continues: “ we Americans are increasingly becoming what I call "mixers, blenders, benders and switchers" (MBBS). We customize our religious identities -- less in terms of some group-belonging need, creedal purity, or theological consistency, and more in order to get a job done -- and in doing so, we find greater meaning and purpose. Identity, including our religious identity, is becoming fluid, permeable, and an ongoing construction -- a verb rather than a noun.”

“Millions of us are moving from the cathedral to the bazaar. Of course, you cannot have people mixing religious ideas and practices in a divine smorgasbord of choice, creating families with diverse inheritances, and, because of new powerful technologies from search engines to connection technologies, getting their religious and spiritual resources independent of religious authorities and expect existing religious institutions to be unaffected. The existing business models and organizational structures of mainstream religion are, as in many fields of meaning-making today (journalism, film, and music), increasingly unsustainable. Fewer and fewer Americans are getting religion in the cathedrals. They are getting what they need to get their spiritual/meaning-making job done in the bazaar, which has a very different model of authority and hierarchy, has very limited barriers of entry and far more choices, and which tends to be a user-friendly and open source environment.”

Notice that while Irwin Kula is a rabbi and works for a Jewish think tank, he is talking here not about “Judaism” but about “American religion.” We are not insulated from the trends which are occurring in the rest of American society. The difficulties that synagogues are having have less to do with the nature of the American Jewish community and more to do with the nature of religious belonging in American society. As an aside, if you think it is only synagogues which are in trouble you don’t know very much about mainline Protestantism. In 1990, out of 248 million Americans, 33 million were mainline Protestants. In 2008, out of 308 million Americans, 29 million were mainline Protestants -- an absolute loss of 4 million members even as the US population increased by almost 25 percent, and a decline in the percentage of the population from 13% to 9.5 percent. There are currently no Protestants on the US Supreme Court and no White Protestants on either presidential ticket.

The reality of “mixers, blenders, benders and switchers” has been with us for some time but we have yet to figure out a way to adjust to this new reality. Rabbi Kula writes “This is unnerving stuff, and predictably, we have some religious communities becoming more conformist, exclusive, and intolerant.” In other worlds, when the outside world threatens, one natural response is to circle the wagons. The other natural response, writes Rabbi Kula, is to become “more diverse, inclusive, and syncretistic.”

This is not an easy reality to adjust to for those of us who identify with Conservative Judaism. On the one hand, we belong to a movement that has historically said that our decision making process must be in accordance with Jewish law. We have said that kiddushin, Jewish marriage, is between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman. We have said that a Jew is someone who is born to a Jewish mother or who has undergone a proper conversion which includes a trip to the mikveh, and ritual circumcision in the case of a man. Indeed, for Conservative rabbis all of these are not merely norms but what are known as Standards of Rabbinic Practice -- meaning that by failing to adhere to them we could lose our standing as Conservative rabbis, with all that entails.

On the other hand, we Conservative Jews are in fact religious liberals. We don’t live in isolation from the rest of American society. We live in multireligious neighborhoods and we send our kids to multiethnic schools. And we understand that in living in these neighborhoods and attending these schools, we are going to meet and fall in love with people who are compatible with us in every way but one -- religion. And so we figure out how best to deal with that reality. I find it interesting that until some time in the 1950s a Jew who was married to a non-Jew could not, according to United Synagogue policy, be a member of a Conservative congregation. And then the United Synagogue said you could be a member but not a board member; then a board member but not an officer; and today the official policy is that a Jew married to a non-Jew can be an officer but not the president -- a policy which my prior pulpit in Norwich, CT ignored on more than one occasion with no repercussions. The United Synagogue was still happy to accept their dues.

I should add that it is not only we Conservative Jews who are still struggling to adapt to the new American religious realities. Our Reform cousins are generally perceived to be “friendlier” to mixed couples and their children. For example, they will accept the child of one Jewish parent as a Jew, regardless of whether that parent is the mother or the father, provided that the child is raised with an exclusive Jewish identity. But therein lies the rub -- exclusive Jewish identity. Reform Judaism is no friendlier than we are to the idea that a child can be both a Jew and a Christian at the same time, that a baby can have both a baptism and a bris or a synagogue naming ceremony. Neither they nor we are willing to accommodate a family that wants on some weeks to send their child to the synagogue religious school and some weeks to Sunday school at a church. The Reform message, like ours, is, you can be a Jewish child with a Christian parent, you can be a Christian child with a Jewish parent, but you can’t be a Christian and a Jew at the same time.

Many parents in Reform and Conservative congregations accept this reality; we have many Jewish young men and women who have a non-Jewish parent who is fully supportive of their child’s development as a Jew. But Rabbi Kula’s idea that we are moving from the “cathedral” to the “bazaar” may mean that increasingly, parents will want to take aspects from whatever identity they find meaningful without necessarily buying into the whole package. We can accommodate their desires or not, but we don’t own a copyright on the name Judaism and ultimately, people will do what works for them, or in Rabbi Kula’s phrase, “gets the job done.”

My talk this morning has been more descriptive than prescriptive. I can assure you that a few years ago I would have decried many of the phenomena I have described this morning, because at heart I am basically comfortable with the Jewish tradition as we’ve inherited it. But at a certain point in my life I came to a realization: people are going to do what they are going to do and it doesn’t really matter very much whether I approve or not. The role of the rabbi is no longer, if it ever was, telling people what to do. It is to share his or her wisdom and knowledge with people, Jewish and Gentile, both or neither, in hopes that some of it will make sense and enrich the lives of those with whom he or she comes in contact. As Rabbi Kula writes: “indeed, there are no road maps, -- so we are making it up as we go along. But the more people love each other, and the more people with different inheritances and traditions form intimate relationships and families, the better we will understand each other across all boundaries, and the wiser we will be at knowing what from our rich traditions we need to let go of and transcend, and what we need to bring along with us to help us create better lives and build a better world.”

To the extent that our traditions and institutions help people create better lives and a better world, they will continue to be viable. And that, after all, is the task to which we are called as humans and as Jews, and to which we are called to rededicate ourselves on Rosh Hashanah. Hayom Harat Olam -- this day the world is created. It’s a confusing and sometimes crazy-making world -- but I wouldn’t trade it for any other.

Two-Minute Torah: Not in Heaven

Every year on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, we read the following words from Parashat Nitzavim, Deuteronomy, Chapter 30:

“11 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 13Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 14No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”

When we say that the Torah is “not in heaven,” what do we mean?

The Jewish tradition has understood these words in a few different ways. Many of you are familiar with the Talmudic passage from Bava Metzia 59b where Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua are arguing about the ritual purity of a certain type of oven. Rabbi Eliezer gets frustrated and invokes all kinds of miracles and finally a heavenly voice to prove that his position is the correct one. But upon hearing the heavenly voice Rabbi Joshua rises and says “it is not in heaven,” and therefore we pay no attention to heavenly voices. The rabbis of each generation have to decide the law; we don’t have the option of appealing to God directly. The Torah is not in heaven. It was once, but God has chosen to give it over into human hands.

It is this human role in the system which has allowed Judaism to adapt and grow over the centuries. When a religion has no possibility of amending its laws -- or when those amendments depend on direct ratification from God -- it becomes very difficult if not impossible to adapt to changing conditions. If I ever announced to the congregation that God had spoken directly to me and commanded a new law or changed an old one, what would your reaction be? Is there room in Judaism for a sense of a new revelation that is not rooted in the text? Why or why not? 

Two-Minute Torah: The Stubborn and Rebellious Son

Deuteronomy 21:18-21, towards the beginning of this week's Parasha Ki Tetze, contains what is known as the "Law of the Stubborn and Rebellious Son." According to this law, if a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his parents, they can have him executed. Now if truth be told, I was a pretty good kid, but nevertheless I did go through a rebellious phase during my teenage years. I suspect that if this law were to be literally followed, few of us would survive adolescence.

It is not clear whether this law was ever implemented in Biblical times, but the rabbis placed so many conditions on it as to make it unenforceable. Among other things, the rabbis emphasized that the biblical verse has the parents tell the judge "this our son does not listen to our voice." Our voice, not our voices. So they reasoned that in order to enforce the law, the parents had to have the identical voice, not only metaphorically but literally. Unless the two parents' voices sounded identical, the law could not be enforced. And since our voice is influenced by, among other things, our body, both parents had to be the same height and weight to enforce this law. The Talmud, in Chapter 8 of Tractate Sanhedrin, tells us that a case which met the requirements of this law "never existed and never will exist." Why then was the law given? So that we could receive the merit of learning and properly interpreting it.

This abbreviated discussion of a complicated subject raises some questions. Is the rabbinic interpretation faithful to the biblical intent? Personally, I think not, but as my teacher Rabbi Michael Cook told us in Bible I, "Judaism is not what the Bible says; Judaism is what the Rabbis said the Bible means." It does point out the fact that one does not understand Judaism if one knows only the plain text of the Torah. The rabbis strove constantly to interpret difficult Torah texts in the most humane way possible and made the death penalty nearly impossible to implement.

Two-minute Torah: Pleonasms

The word “shoftim” means judges or magistrates, and this week’s Parasha begins with the command to establish a justice sytem. Most of Parashat Shoftim consists of “political” material -- political in the sense of the Greek word polis which means a body of citizens. Parashat Shoftim is interested in teaching us how to create a just society.

Much of Jewish biblical interpretation is rooted in a very close reading of the biblical text. If the Torah uses more language than seems necessary to convey the point in question, (technically known as a pleonasm), the Sages conclude that the additional language comes to teach us something we would not otherwise know.

Two examples in Shoftim have been significant in the development of Jewish law and lore. In Deuteronomy 16:20 we read tzedek tzedek tirdof, “justice justice shall you pursue.” Why does the text say “justice justice” when simply saying “justice” could have sufficed? What does the additional “justice” teach us? Various commentators have suggested a number of possibilities: that justice trumps other competing values (such as compassion or communal harmony); that the pursuit of justice must be carried out in a just manner and the ends do not justify the means; that not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done and that the procedures must be fair and transparent. What are your thoughts?

The second example is Deuteronomy 17:8, where we are instructed to turn for judgments to “the magistrate in charge at the time.” Here, too, the Sages point out that “in charge at the time: is superfluous, that the text could simply have said to go to “the magistrate.” After all, you can only go to the magistrate in charge at the time; you can’t go to a magistrate who lived in a prior era or one who has not yet been born! So what does the text add to our knowledge?

Shabbat and Technology

Almost twenty years ago, I was the part-time interim rabbi of the Conservative synagogue in Reno, Nevada, spending every other Friday through Sunday in that community. One of the members of the congregation asked for some guidance regarding Shabbat observance.

This congregant and his wife were born in another country and came from a Sephardic background. They were among the most observant members of the congregation. Like pretty much everyone else in the community, they lived far away from the synagogue and drove to services, but they did not go to their office or go shopping or to the movies, etc., on Shabbat. They tried to observe Shabbat as fully as they could within the context of the community in which they lived.

The problem was that their kids, especially in the spring and summer when Shabbat ended pretty late on Saturday, were starting to dread Shabbat. There weren’t many other kids in the neighborhood to play with, and the kids were really starting to feel both bored and isolated. He didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, he really did not want his kids watching television on Shabbat; on the other hand, he didn’t want his kids growing up hating Shabbat either, with the likelihood that they would abandon Jewish observance when they grew up and moved out.

What advice would you have given this man? What advice do you think I, as a Conservative rabbi, should have given him?

Jewish Ideas Daily recently ran an appreciation of Yosef Achituv, a leading educator of the Religious (i.e. Orthodox) Kibbutz Movement, who passed away in early June. In many ways the ideology of the Religious Kibbutz Movement is similar to that of Conservative Judaism, and Achituv was a Fellow of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, a pluralistic institution where he taught side-by-side with Conservative and Reform thinkers. While he appreciated Conservative Judaism, he was also critical of it, according to Jewish Ideas Daily, because “its halakhic innovation did not emerge from the ongoing life of communities but was rather the product of meta-reflection by the movement's intellectuals, inorganically grafted onto the halakhic process.”

In other words, Conservative Judaism lacks a true community which actually lives by the halakhic decisions that the movement promulgates. There is a certain validity to this critique. Most of our members do not observe Shabbat, kashrut, or daily prayer according to the theoretical standards of Conservative Judaism. On a certain level, there is no pressing need to resolve halakhic problems, because our members in general will do what they feel is right regardless of what the Movement’s rabbis tell them.

An example which to some extent validates Achituv’s critique is a recent responsum by Rabbi Daniel Nevins, the Dean of JTS’ Rabbinical School, on the use of electronic devices on Shabbat, which was approved by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement.

Rabbi Nevins first reiterates previous rulings that the use of electricity per se is not a violation of Shabbat. He demonstrates, correctly in my opinion, that the classic Orthodox equations of electricity with either fire or “making something new” (a circuit) are erroneous and there is no actual prohibition on the use of electricity.

However, while the use of electricity per se may be permitted, actions which nonetheless constitute Shabbat violations in and of themselves do not become permitted simply because they are done by means of electricity. Cooking, for example, is an activity which is forbidden on Shabbat, and that prohibition includes heating water. So, for example, I permit turning on lights in the synagogue on Shabbat, but a Jewish person is not allowed to plug in a coffee pot on Shabbat, because in doing so he or she violates the prohibition on cooking.

While I agree with much of what Rabbi Nevins wrote in his responsum, I am not sure that I agree, for example, with his prohibition of the use of e-readers on Shabbat. He notes that almost all e-readers are connected to the Internet and even those which are not, nevertheless make a record of where one has stopped reading so that it can return to the same page later on. Rabbi Nevins considers this “writing” and thus a biblical violation of Shabbat.

Rabbi Nevins is certainly a greater scholar than I and his responsum has made me re-think my own usage of an e-reader on Shabbat. I have decided that from now on, I will turn off the Internet function of my Kindle on Shabbat as a symbolic separation of workday from Shabbat activities. But I don’t consider the Kindle’s use of memory to remember where I have stopped reading a particular book or magazine to be “writing.” It isn’t permanent, for one thing, and part of the definition of prohibited writing on Shabbat is permanence. Beyond that, it seems to me that even though the electronic record may be an inevitable by-product of using an e-reader, it is at worst in halachic terms a p’sik reisha d’lo ichpat lei (an inevitable consequence but one that the user doesn’t really desire or care about) and thus at worst a rabbinic violation.

Beyond that, there is a question of what values we are trying to implement and live by and who our community really consists of. I remember many years ago attending a class taught by Rabbi Joel Roth, a Talmud professor at JTS and generally considered one of the more stringent halachic decisors in the Conservative movement. To the surprise of many of us in his lecture, he advocated that Conservative synagogues should allow acoustic instrumental music on Shabbat at a Bar or Bat Mitzvah luncheon. His reasoning was as follows: instrumental music on Shabbat is only a rabbinic prohibition while eating non-kosher food is a biblical prohibition. Since the likely result of prohibiting instrumental music would be that the Bar or Bat Mitzvah family would hold a non-kosher reception in a restaurant rather than a kosher reception in the synagogue, he would allow the instrumental music in order to have more Jews eating kosher.

I would maintain that the use of e-readers will soon be analogous if it is not already so. E-books are much cheaper than paper books, and this allows works of Jewish thought and spirituality to be read by more people than ever before. They are also more environmentally-friendly, and Rabbi Nevins correctly notes that the Jewish value of bal taschit, not wasting resources, is one of the issues to be considered in evaluating any particular technology. I suspect that within the lifetime of many who are reading this, standard books will be almost if not entirely replaced by e-books. It may be that if enough Jews refrain from the use of e-readers on Shabbat, Jewish publishers will continue to print regular books, but they will become so expensive that few will be able to afford them. I think that Rabbi Nevins’ prohibition of the use of e-readers on Shabbat is one that few Conservative Jews who are not rabbis or JTS rabbinical students will follow.

To return to the situation with which I started this discussion, my advice to my Reno congregant was that he allow his children to watch videos on Shabbat, but that it be limited to videos with Jewish content only. In this way, Shabbat would be made distinct from the rest of the week, his kids would be exposed to more Jewish learning, and they would not grow up finding Shabbat a burden rather than a delight.

Similarly, I would encourage us to disconnect our e-readers from the Internet on Shabbat and read books of Jewish content on that day.

I have tried to stress over the years that Jewish observance is not a case of “all or nothing.” The questions posed to Conservative rabbis at times do not have simple answers, because the questioners are trying to include more Jewishness in their lives without necessarily making a commitment to full observance. I am grateful to be part of a Movement that struggles with these issues and recognizes that different rabbis and different communities may legitimately come up with different answers.

Two-Minute Torah: Do Not Add or Detract

As rabbi of a synagogue, one of my roles is to answer questions of Jewish law. While on occasion I get questions about kashrut or Shabbat or burial and mourning, the area where I tend to get the most questions is naming. The typical question is something like the following: "My grandfather's name was Irving, but we are not sure what his Hebrew name was. We want to name our baby after him. If it is a boy we want to name him Jared and if it is a girl, Jordana. Is that OK? I was taught that it has to be the same first letter to count, but in Hebrew both I and J would be written with a yud, so we figure that's OK. Right, Rabbi?"

When faced with a question such as this, I would generally answer that there is absolutely no halacha (Jewish law) whatsoever about naming. That it is all a matter of custom, not law, and the happy parents are free to name their baby anything they wish, but they should try to be sensitive to the feelings of other family members. And they usually respond in stark disbelief, because "everyone knows" what the Jewish "law" is on this subject.

This is to some extent an example of something that our Torah portion this week warns us against. In Deuteronomy 13:1 Moses says in God's name "be careful to observe only that which I enjoin upon you; neither add to it nor take away from it." We are required to observe God's commandments, but we are not supposed to invent new ones on our own. Tradition and custom are fine, but we have to be careful to distinguish between what is actually law and what is merely custom. I wish that more of us would be as scrupulous in observance of the actual mitzvot as we are in observing customs, many of which are based in superstition. Name your child whatever you wish, but the cause of Judaism would be better served by making sure that the meal for the bris or baby-naming, and later on the Bar or Bat Mitzvah, is kosher.