Two-minute Torah: Old Tablets, New Tablets

In this week's Parasha, Ekev, Moses continues his summation of everything that Israel has experienced from the Exodus to this moment, when he is delivering his farewell address. He of course will lead the people to the edge of the Promised Land but he will not cross over the Jordan with them.

In the tenth Chapter of Exodus, Moses reminds his people of the sin of the Golden Calf, his response of shattering the tablets of the Law, and God's acceptance of Israel's repentance through the issuance of a new set of tablets. In verse five, Moses says "I placed the tablets in the Ark." It is not explicit to which set of tablets Moses is referring, but the Midrash tells us that both the new, intact set and the old, shattered one were placed in the Ark.

This action, to me, symbolizes what we as Conservative Jews should strive to do. As Jews of the middle ground, we are struggling mightily against two opposite tendencies. The first tendency is to see everything ancient as useless and outmoded. Everything new is the latest and the best; it must be adopted immediately or one is hopelessly uncool, even if, as we often find, the technology is not really ready for the market.

The second tendency is fundamentalism, reaction. Everything ancient must be preserved exactly as it is. No change is permissible, even though we know that anything which fails to evolve must die. Therefore people of this ilk invent a false past. According to this type of mythology, the Founding Fathers were all Evangelical Christians (though in reality most were either Deists or Unitarians) and Jews in Boro Park, Brooklyn, live in precisely the same way our ancestors lived in ancient Israel (a land which never saw black coats and fur hats or Yiddish until about 150 years ago).

As Conservative Jews we take the lessons of Moses. Both the old (the broken tablets) and the new (the second set of tablets) are holy.

Two-minute Torah: The Lord is One, But are We?

As many of you know I grew up as a Reform Jew. At the point in services when we would recite the Shema, which appears in this week's Torah portion VaEtchanan, the rabbi would call on us to rise (Reform Jews generally stand for the Shema) and recite "the watchword of our faith.' My brother, who is almost five years younger than I, misheard this phrase as "the wash word of our face" which at least had some internal logic to it. Of course, it became impossible for me to keep from laughing inside whenever the rabbi would recite that phrase.

There are many ways to translate the Shema but let us for the moment stick with the most common translation. "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Notice that this verse which is often called the most important prayer in Judaism is not in fact a prayer at all. Prayers are addressed to God. This verse talks about God but it is in fact addressed to the people of Israel.

The Lord may be one but the people of Israel are certainly not. Two years ago a “Conversion Bill” was introduced in the Israeli Knesset which would formally grant all power over conversion in Israel to the Chief Rabbinate -- effectively denying the right of non-Orthodox converts, and their descendants, to make aliyah and gain Israeli citizenship. An outcry from Diapora Jews has led so far to a delay in passing this proposed law. A commission was set up shortly after to study the issue “for six months” and has still not produced its recommendations. In the meanwhile, however, new procedures have been implemented giving the Israeli Chief Rabbinate control over recognition of Orthodox conversions outside of Israel. So for the time being if you are a Reform or Conservative convert you can still make aliyah and get an Israeli identity card which says you are a Jew. But if you are an Orthodox convert, unless you were converted by one of the very small number of American rabbis the Israeli Chief Rabbinate considers sufficiently stringent, you cannot.

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has announced he will retire in 2013 and they are trying to figure out a process to name his successor. The problem is how exactly to do that. While Rabbi Sacks is often called the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, he is in reality the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue. (Yes, in the UK the “United Synagogue” is the umbrella body of modern Orthodoxy, not of Conservative Judaism as it is here. Solomon Schechter brought the idea for the name over with him when he moved from Cambridge University to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.) Which means that Rabbi Sacks is actually the Chief Rabbi of those who agree to accept him as the Chief Rabbi.

Who do not accept him as the Chief Rabbi? Let’s enumerate the groups: first, the Federation of Synagogues which is a more stringently Orthodox body than the United Synagogue. Then there are the Sephardim, who point out that they got to England first. Then there are the Reform, the Liberal (two different movements in the UK), and the Masorti (Conservative). All of these bodies reject the authority of the Chief Rabbi and many reject the concept of a Chief Rabbinate at all. And yet, the perception of the non-Jewish public in the UK is that the “Chief Rabbi” is head of all Jewry in the way that the Archbishop of Canterbury is the head of the Anglican Church or the Cardinal of Westminster is the head of all Catholics in the UK.

So the raging topic in British Jewry is how to select a new Chief Rabbi. Should the groups which don’t accept his authority still have a say, since they are impacted willy-nilly by how the Chief Rabbi is perceived in the larger world? Should there be a Chief Rabbi at all? Or maybe more than one?

Everyone is in favor of Jewish unity but mostly when we speak of unity, we mean “everyone else should be more like we are.” The fact is that we are not one, and any attempt to formulate a universally-acceptable definition of Jewish identity, belief or practice is going to fail. On its simplest level, the Haredim will never recognize a Conservative convert as a Jew, and we Conservative Jews will never agree to a definition which leaves more and more of us (including my own wife and daughter) defined as non-Jews. What is needed is a way for us to respect and honor our differences, and to work together even when we do not agree.

Transitions

I write this on my first day as your new rabbi Both our new home and my study in the synagogue are filled with cartons waiting to be unpacked. Still, I am reminded that the four weeks between my election as your rabbi and my family’s move to Gaithersburg compares quite favorably with the haste in which our ancestors left Egypt. While four weeks is not much time to find a house, find a mover, pack, and so on, at least we would have had time to allow our bread to rise -- if we were bakers, which we are not!

But the story of the Exodus is not just about leaving in haste. We learn many things from the Torah, but one of the lessons that we often fail to learn is that a transition is not an event, it is a process. Our ancestors did not go overnight from Egypt to the Promised Land. It took forty years to get there, forty years of struggle and strife, of hope and despair and nostalgia for an Egypt which was so much nicer in retrospect than it ever was in reality. The lesson of the Forty Years in the Desert is deeply countercultural, because we live in a society that expects results and expects them now. But as many a musician can testify, it takes years of work to become an overnight success.

Author and psychologist William Bridges is one of the leading experts on transition. Bridges describes a successful transition as consisting of three periods -- the ending, or letting go of the past; the neutral zone, where the end of the old era is in sight but the new era has not yet started; and a new beginning. It’s counterintuitive, because we usually think of something as having a beginning, a middle and an end. But Bridges shows us that transitions have an end, a middle, and a beginning. It seems to me that in the last few months the story of Kehilat Shalom and the story of the Arian family have so far both followed the pattern which Bridges describes.

When I came to Gaithersburg to interview with Kehilat Shalom, and subsequently when my wife Keleigh and I came to look for our new home, I have discussed with many of you my belief that Jewish life, Jewish identity, and the nature of religious belonging in American society are in a period of rapid change, and synagogues will have to adapt or become irrelevant. But I also believe that the most important thing a synagogue can offer is a sense of real community. I love the fact that Kehilat Shalom sees itself as a place “where friends become family” and we have certainly felt that to be the case.

My goal as your rabbi is to preserve the best of the past as we move together into the future. The key word in that goal is “together.” My hope in the next several months is to meet as many congregants as possible and get to know you as individuals. There will be a number of events to which the whole congregation is invited but there will also be many small group invitations to tea or coffee or a nosh. Please take these opportunities to get to know me, to share your hopes and dreams for our shul. I hope it will take less than forty years, and I know that together we can reach the Promised Land.

Hiatus

You may have noticed that I have not posted anything in a bit over a month. We are in transition from Norwich, CT to Gaithersburg, MD, and the needs to find a new home, pack, move, etc. have taken priority. As of August 1 I will be the rabbi of Kehilat Shalom in Gaithersburg and I'm very excited to join this warm and vibrant community. I hope to resume posting in early to mid August.

Two-minute Torah: In The Wilderness

This Shabbat we begin reading the fourth book of the Torah. The English name of this book is Numbers but in Hebrew it is known as B'midbar, "In The Wilderness." It covers almost 38 years of the 40 year period from the departure from Egypt to the entrance into the promised land.

In his seminal book "Exodus and Revolution," the great American Jewish philosopher Michael Walzer draws a contrast between messianism and what he calls "Exodus Politics." In some ways for us Jews it is a subtle distinction, because obviously Passover is connected in Jewish thought with the messianic idea. For example, we symbolically welcome Elijah (the harbinger of the Messiah) at the Passover Seder, and most of the many references to the Exodus in Jewish liturgy make it clear that it is viewed as a synechdoche for the ultimate redemption of the entire world.

Yet, Walzer points out that messianism and "Exodus politics" are in tension if not actually opposites. Messianism is supernatural, for one thing; it depends on divine action. It is total and immediate and does not take realpolitik into account. Exodus politics is gradualistic -- we don't go from slavery to Promised Land overnight, it takes 40 years. And exodus politics is melioristic -- it strives not for perfection but for improvement. As long as today is better than yesterday, we are moving towards the Promised Land.

The message of the Wilderness is not one we like to hear. We live in a society of microwaves, instant messaging and sound bites. The American Jewish community is looking for the magic bullet that will cure all of our problems. For a while it was day schools, then it was Birthright, then it was Jewish camping, then "indie minyanim," and now it's Tribefest and Moishe House. All of these are good things, by the way, but no one magic bullet is going to guarantee the survival of American Jewry. And no one magic bullet is going to solve the problems of any particular synagogue. It takes a lot of work and a lot of patience.

As Walzer says, there are three lessons of Exodus politics:

1.) wherever you are now, it is probably Egypt;

2.) the Promised Land is real;

3.) the only way to get there is to march through the wilderness -- there are no shortcuts.

Two-minute Torah: Strangers and Sojourners

Both English and Hebrew have pleonasms, phrases which express in more than one word something that could just as easily be expressed with only one word. We often speak of "tuna fish" when "tuna" would convey exactly the same thing. My late Uncle Max used to say that something has "all the vitamins and minerals" and lawyers often speak of "rules and regulations." Yes, technically a vitamin is not a mineral and a rule is not a regulation, but we recognize both of these usages as simply figures of speech.

In the Hebrew Bible we find the terms "ger v'toshav," "stranger and sojourner." When he seeks to buy a burial place for his wife Sarah, Abraham describes himself to the native Hittites as a "ger v'toshav." And in this week's parasha, in Lev. 25:23, we are told that the land cannot be sold in perpetuity, because we are "gerim v'toshavim" with God, which the new JPS translation renders as "for you are but strangers resident with Me."

We accept "ger v'toshav" as a pleonasm meaning something like "resident alien."  But I recently came across a teaching from my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Rabbi Yaakov Krantz, the Dubner Maggid, where he says that they are actually opposite. 

"Ger carries the connotation of temporariness while toshav carries the connotation of permanence. God said to Israel: “The relationship between you and Me is always that of ‘strangers and settlers.’ If you live in the world like strangers, remembering that you are only here temporarily, then I will be a settler in your midst, in that My Presence will dwell with you permanently. But if you will regard yourselves as settlers, as permanent owners of the land on which you live, forgetting that the land is actually not yours but Mine, My Presence will be a stranger in that it will not dwell in your midst.“

“In any case, you (Israel) and I (God) cannot be strangers and settlers at the same time. If you act like a stranger, then I will be the settler, and if you act the settler, I must be the stranger.”

Two-minute Torah: Conflict of Laws

What does one do if two different authorities give you conflicting orders? For example, during Prohibition the manufacture and sale of wine was prohibited. But according to some understandings of Jewish law, wine (as opposed to grape juice) MUST be used for Friday night Kiddush and the four cups during the Passover Seder. What to do?

As it happens, the Prohibition legislation allowed for a "sacramental exemption" and both synagogues and Catholic churches were able to obtain wine under it. But what if such an exemption had not been allowed?

This week's Torah reading contains a curious line. Lev. 19:3 says "Everyone shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall observe My sabbaths, I am the LORD." Why are the two combined in this one verse?

It should be noted, of course, that both observing the Sabbath and honoring our parents had already been commanded in the Ten Commandments. So we already know that we are supposed to do these things. What new knowledge does this particular verse impart to us?

Rashi says that the verse is specifically addressing a situation where one's parent tells him or her to violate Shabbat. Yes, in general we are supposed to obey our parents, but in this particular case, the verse is clarifying that at least as far as Shabbat goes, our obligation to God outweighs our obligation to our parents. In other words, the letter "vav" in the verse really means "nevertheless", not simply "and."

I don't know whether this was a common issue in Rashi's day but it is not uncommon today. In sociology, "Hansen's Law" tells us that in immigrant societies, the third generation often seeks to reclaim what the second generation discarded. And thus it is not uncommon for American Jews who are grandchildren of immigrants (as I am) to be more observant than their parents. And with the growth in the number of Jews by Choice, it is also not uncommon for observant Jews to have non-Jewish parents. And so our parents may schedule a family reunion on Shabbat, or expect us to attend some other type of event on Shabbat. We feel a tension because we know we are supposed to honor our parents, but we also have Shabbat norms that we should not violate.

This verse gives us guidance. If it is possible to honor our parents' wishes without violating Shabbat (or eating non-kosher food), we should do so. Hopefully, our non-Jewish or non-observant parents will meet us halfway and seek to accommodate our needs. But if it is impossible to do both, Shabbat takes precedence. And it stands to reason -- we are obligated to honor our parents, but both us and our parents are obligated to honor God.