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.

Some Thoughts After Orlando

This has been a very difficult week for our country.

The murder of 49 people in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando has brought out some of the best and some of the worst in people and in our national character.

The gunman was an American-born Muslim, the son of immigrants from Afghanistan. In the midst of the massacre he called 911 and reported that he was acting out of loyalty to ISIS. But he also claimed loyalty to both An-Nusra and Hezbollah. This is kind of like someone claiming simultaneous loyalty to the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. ISIS and An-Nusra both stem from an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam, but they split in 2014 and have been actively fighting each other in Syria. Hezbollah is Shiite and not even considered to be Islamic by the other two -- and most likely, vice-versa. While the killer may well have been motivated by a perversion of Islamic teachings, he was also reportedly a regular at the nightclub and on gay dating sites. Since he is now dead, we will never know what motivated him to do what he did.

What we do know is that people were murdered because of who they loved and who they were. We also know that, too sadly, some Americans are singling out other Americans of one religion because of the actions of one adherent of that same religion. As Jews, we know from our own history what happens when all of us are blamed for the actions of one or a few of us.

Europe has had a problem in assimilating Muslims into the larger society. There are all kinds of reasons for this, beyond the scope of this brief message, but the result is that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Muslims in Europe who are deeply alienated from the countries in which they were born, reside, and have citizenship. The same is not true in the United States. American Muslims are a lot like their Jewish neighbors. They are professionals, doctors, scientists, engineers. They enjoy higher than average incomes and higher than average levels of education. They think that their neighborhoods are pretty good places to live, they are not particularly religious, and they wish that their leaders were doing more to combat extremism in the religion. Commentary Magazine, which is certainly right-of-center and hawkish on Israel and the Middle East, just published an excellent article on this topic and I encourage you to read it.

On Monday evening I attended an interfaith Iftar (Ramadan break-fast) where the local Muslim community reached out to the LGBT community. It was very moving to see our Muslim neighbors coming to grips with the anti-gay attitudes in their community and wondering how to move forward. We Jews have our own mess to clean up in this regard, and while we have certainly made progress there is still quite a ways to go.

Rabbi Shai Held of Machon Hadar and the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote this week: “One of the biggest problems with religion is that people stubbornly, insistently reduce God to their own size; they imagine that God loves the same people they love, and that God hates the people they hate. This is not just insidious theology; it’s actually idolatry, because people are just worshiping a blown up version of themselves. So let me say it simply: God’s love transcends all of that.”

A lot of people in America are hurting today: LGBT folks, Muslims, others who feel put upon or marginalized for all kinds of reasons. Our task is to be the hands of God in this world, and reach out to those who are hurting and say “God loves you and so do I.”

Thoughts on our 45th Anniversary

On Sunday May 22 Kehilat Shalom celebrated its 45th anniversary. These are my thoughts on the occasion:

As a rabbi I generally look to Jewish wisdom when I am called upon to write a message for a particular occasion. If we were celebrating a round number I would turn to Pirkei Avot, which in its fifth chapter gives the significance of every anniversary from twenty all the way up to 100 -- but only in increments of ten.

What is the significance, then, of a 45th anniversary? Gematria is a kabbalistic method of understanding the significance of words based on the numerical values of their letters, since every Hebrew letter has a numerical value. The best-known example of gematria may be the Jewish predilection for making donations in multiples of 18, since 18 is the numerical values of the Hebrew word “chai,” life.

The number 45 yields לב אחד, “one heart.” When we act together for the good of our kehila, our community, our country and our brothers and sisters throughout the world, we act with one heart.

The number 45 also yields איזה טוב ה, “how good is God.” When we act with one heart, we come closer to God and we bring God’s goodness into the world through prayer, through study, and especially through acts of lovingkindness. These are the things which our kehila exists to do, and these are the things that God has created us to do. How good is God when we act with lev echad, one heart.

And finally, the number 45 yields לא זז, “not going anywhere.” As long as our kehila continues to act with one heart and make plain the goodness of God in this world, we are not going anywhere.

Kitniyot Revisited

Last year shortly before Pesach I was asked during a Kiddush Konversation about an article which had been published in Voices of Conservative Judaism which summarized a responsum by Rabbi David Golinkin permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover. My response was that Rabbi Golinkin was an Israeli Conservative rabbi writing for the Israeli community and that I was not prepared to endorse the practice unless and until it was permitted by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement (CJLS or Law Committee.)

A quick review of the term kitniyot. Often translated as “legumes,” kitniyot are foods which Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally avoided during Pesach even though they are not chametz, leaven. Sephardic Jews have always eaten them. Among the products considered kitniyot are beans, rice, peas, corn, and mustard. Although Ashkenazi Jews have refrained from consuming them during Pesach, it was permitted to possess them and thus they were not sold before Pesach or disposed of as chametz is. Knowledgeable Ashkenazim knew that it was even permitted during Pesach to eat from utensils which had been used to prepare or serve kitniyot as long as one avoided the kitniyot themselves.

At the end of December 2015, the Law Committee passed (by a vote of 19-1 with 2 abstentions) a responsum by Rabbis Avram Reisner and Amy Levin permitting all Jews to consume kitniyot during Pesach with certain guidelines. It’s important to understand what those guidelines are because this responsum is not a blanket permission to eat any product that seems not to contain chametz just by glancing at the ingredients.

Rabbis Reisner and Levin go through the history of this practice and the various reasons that have been adduced as to why it has been followed. (It should also be noted that throughout history there were a number of great sages who viewed this as a mistaken custom and tried to eliminate it, while others said that while there was no real basis for it it should nevertheless be observed out of deference to previous generations.)

No one is absolutely sure why Ashkenazim originally prohibited kitniyot but the classic halachic literature has adduced three possibilities:

1. kitniyot were either stored or cooked in the same manner as chametz and people might accidentally eat chametz thinking it was only kitniyot;
2. kitniyot were harvested, stored and transported together with chametz and there was a possibility that the two would become mixed together;
3. kitniyot and wheat (the most common chametz grain) were usually cooked together and it was considered impossible to permit one without dragging in the other.

Rabbis Reisner and Levin point out that these reasons are no longer cogent. Our marketplace is not like those of previous generations; we buy our foodstuffs in discrete packages, produced and labeled with both governmental and market oversight. We need not be concerned that permitting one will perforce lead to the accidental consumption of the other.

And yet, we are generally careful not to override centuries of precedent without very good reason. In my words -- not theirs -- the burden of proof is on the one who wishes to change previous practices. We don’t have to justify why a certain practice should be maintained; we need to justify why a certain practice should not be maintained.

What then is the justification for overturning this custom?

Rabbis Reisner and Levin cite two: increasing the joy of the holiday and the inflated cost of products under Pesach supervision.

Some years ago the Law Committee had already approved consumption of kitniyot by vegetarians who feared that they might not get enough protein over the holiday. This reasoning is now extended to all of us; many Jews who are not vegetarians are nevertheless seeking to cut down on their consumption of meat and of other animal products, for both health and ethical reasons. Beans in particular serve as a good source of protein in the absence of meat and permitting all Jews to consume beans on Pesach will increase our ability to eat a healthy diet without a lot of meat or dairy.

Similarly, we are all aware of how incredibly expensive kosher-for-Passover products can be. Permitting kitniyot will allow for a more balanced diet with less reliance on pre-packaged, expensive foods, and Rabbis Reisner and Levin point out that keeping the cost of Jewish observance reasonable has been cited as a halachic principle going back as far as 3rd century Babylonia.

The CJLS thus rules as follows:

In order to bring down the cost of making Pesah and support the healthier diet that is now becoming more common, and given the inapplicability today of the primary concerns that seem to have led to the custom of prohibiting kitniyot, and further, given our inclination in our day to present an accessible Judaism unencumbered by unneeded prohibitions, more easily able to participate in the culture that surrounds us, we are prepared to rely on the fundamental observance recorded in the Talmud and codes and permit the eating of kitniyot on Pesah.

However, this is not a blanket permission to rely on ingredient lists to determine if a product is acceptable for Pesach. While such a procedure might be justifiable during the rest of the year (given that prohibited food is nullified by permitted food which is 60 times its volume) it is not permitted during Pesach because there is no nullification of even the smallest amount of chametz which might have become mixed in during the manufacturing process.

These are the particulars of what is now permitted:

1. Fresh corn on the cob and fresh beans (such as lima beans in their pods) may be consumed and purchased before or during Pesach like any other fresh vegetables.
2. Dried kitniyot (beans, rice, legumes) can be purchased only before Pesach and must be sifted before the holiday to remove any grains of wheat or other chametz which might have gotten mixed in. Because of similar concerns of mixtures, they should only be purchased in boxes or bags and not from bulk bins.
3. Frozen kitniyot can only be purchased before Pesach and the consumer must either ascertain that the product is not produced on the same equipment as chametz (a real issue for frozen vegetables since the advent of bagged vegetable mixtures containing pasta) or else sort through the contents beforehand to remove any possible chametz.
4. Processed foods including canned beans still require Pesach certification due to the possibility of admixtures of chametz during production.

The good news regarding processed foods is that products from Israel with reliable certification “for those who eat kitniyot” are increasingly available, and the O-U has started certifying a small number of kitniyot-containing products as well for their Sephardic constituents. These products may now be consumed by all.

I want to also point out that just because something is permitted does not mean it is required. Failure to do everything the law allows you to do is not a violation of the law. I have no doubt that many of our people will be uncomfortable changing practices which they and their families have observed for centuries if not millenia; if this is you, you are of course free to continue refraining from kitniyot.

Similarly, since the synagogue kitchen should follow practices which allow as many Jews as permissible to feel comfortable with what they are eating or drinking, current practice for the Pesach seder and for kiddushes during Passover will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future.

If you have any questions or concerns, or would like a copy of the full responsum by Rabbis Reisner and Levin, please feel free to be in touch.