Weeky Sermons

Parashat Be'hu'ko'tai 5768
May 24, 2008
Bar Mitzvah: Oren Klempner

Shabbat shalom. Y'shar koh'khah to Oren on your chanting of Torah and Haftarah, and your well considered words about trust. Mazal tov to Oren's family, immediate and extended.

This morning's Torah reading opens with some interesting words:

If, with my decrees tayLAY'khu, if you will go in My decrees. Our sages long have commented on this language of tayLAYkhu, literally, it you will go, if you will talk in My decrees and commandments. What is Torah coming to teach us with this way of formulating God's wishes?

For example, one 19th century sage, know as the S'fas Emes, the Tongue of Truth, understood Torah as saying that, no matter how much wisdom and knowledge one has accumulated, each one of us have to go in God's decrees; each one of us must put effort and labor into responding. The great medieval commentator Rashi understood the verse in a similar way.

The Hasidic master, Rabbi Simha Bunim, thought of these words in terms of levels of spirituality. Torah says, "If you will go in My decrees," meaning that one must constantly go higher and higher to greater spiritual levels.

Each one of these authorities is taking the word of Torah here, tayLAYkhu, you shall go, to understand better what God wants of us. I've always enjoyed the teaching of the Sassover rebbe, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov, eighteenth century, who was known as the "father of widows and orphans" and believed in quiet meditations-the Sassover rebbe taught that he learned seven things about serving God by observing the behavior of a thief. (Don't you love the humility of it?) First, a thief does his work mainly at night. Second, he (or she) never goes alone. Third, when he does his work, he takes a lot of risks. Fourth, he will be happy even if he does not get much. Fifth, if he does not succeed today, he will try again tomorrow. Sixth, whatever he stole the day before, he will try again tomorrow. Seventh, he does not consider what he stole the day before enough.

Im b'khu'ko'tai tay'LAY'khu, if you will go, if you really invest yourself in my decrees, it will go well for you.. In his davar torah, Oren made clear the high stakes involved in the challenge to us:

My generation trusts that we will have almost the exact same world when we grow up as when our parents did. Humans are slowly but surely changing the earth, and we see that the adults are breaking our trust by not keeping the world healthy. If we pull out of the war, we can use the money that we never knew we had for other things. We could use the money to stop global warming and fund research methods to repair and stabilize the environment. That way, older humans can fulfill their promise to pass down a safe clean world to the next generation. I ask the adults here, can we trust you to do that?

Oren can speak for himself. I hear in his words echoes of what our sages, through the generations, have heard in the word tayLAYkhu. Torah here is calling us to dig down deep in our souls if we are to have reasonable expectations that our efforts to be decent will result in a world in which decency prevails.

Torah this morning presents a long series of blessings and curses that await us, depending upon our personal and communal choices. And the whole business depends upon the ways in which we do or do not really go in our efforts to be decent people.

Elie Wiesel has another way of saying it when he points to the ease with which we become by-standers to evil. But Oren points out that the nature of the challenges that we face today, with the threat to Earth itself, make it more and more imperative for us actively to go, to walk with God in speaking out at injustice.

So let us have the courage to work together, taking risks, accepting small victories, coming back again and again after defeats, never being satisfied with what we did yesterday. For Torah teaches clearly that our God expects us to go deep in responding to the contemporary situation. As Rabbi Tarfon is well known for saying, "The day is short and there is much work to be done. The laborers are sluggish, the reward is great, and the Master is insistent. We are not obliged to complete the task, but neither are we free to desist from it."

Shabbat shalom.

Shabbat HaChodesh 5768
April 5th, 2008

On Approaching Pesah: A Meditation. Today is Shabbat HaChodesh. We just heard announced that the new moon of Nisan comes with three stars this evening. Tonight begins the day of the year upon which our whole calendar revolves. In ancient times, the calendar was set, not by calculation, but rather by sight of the new moon. The message was spread by fires on mountaintops. Imagine the building emotion back then of these days of the year. The first night of Nisan is one of the four Jewish new years; indeed, the new year which promises us, when this new moon grows full in two weeks, the festival of our liberation.

Imagine now-switching from the cycle of our history to the natural cycle of the season-imagine the energy now building within each bud of our bushes and trees. As the spring of spring yearns to be sprung, the heart of Israel beats faster in expectation of the night that we declare so different. And we here in Vermont know, on these chilly nights and warm days, how fast the sap flows.

Now, as the frenzied abandonment of Purim recedes in our consciousness, we wait on the fullness of our annual experience of the saving power of our God. At such times, like the final days of the month of Elul and, sadly, like the first days of the month of Av, we are held back, restrained by our holy calendar.

For, being human, we must live one day at a time. For are we not all, in being Jews, in being human, servants of time? No matter where we may be, ba'aretz, in the Land of Israel or in far corners of the Diaspora, we are servants of time. Always, we are on our way. The sap may flow fast but we are held in the grip of the twenty four hours of each day.

That's where we are ultimately, according to our sages. We are both only and nobly on our way. Some say that Mashiah, the Messiah, is always on the way. By such reckoning, are we not in good company?

It is true-as we know so well approaching Pesah, that there are moments, even fully experienced times, when we are conscious (for moments even stringed together) having arrived; times when we feel so fully at home. As there are times when we know that we are just starting out, those hardest of first days. Yet even at such ends and beginnings, really always, we are on our way.

Contemporary homelessness, the massiveness of the numbers of refugees today, reflects a norm of consciousness as well as a sorrowful physical reality. The transience affects more than those actually sleeping from place to place, driven by hunger and machetes, rockets from gun ships in the sky or bombers on the ground, or just plain old institutionalized poverty that breaks the historic promise of a bed for each one to call home.

God willing, if our species survives, there will be historians to look back on our times. In all probability, given their survival, our descendents will relate the physical insecurity for so many millions in our time to a lack of mooring for our soul. No wonder, they will say, those generations feared for the very survival of their species. Far from "out of the cradle, endlessly rocking," as Whitman prophesied, they were dragged from their mothers' breasts, forced to endure the journeys of barbarians.

It is not too early for us ourselves to say that, so often, we use our sense of transience, the level of our insecurity, to excuse our evasion of responsibility for our fate. Never mind, the forces are too large, the machines too big, radioactivity too invisible to control. To circuit city we flee, to eat, drink and be merry, forgetting that consciousness of transience is no modern phenomenon.

What is new is our capacity to do ourselves in, on a grand scale, and there is a force of inertia about this knowledge. Once upon a time, one did not have to be a sage to understand that the alternative to the insecurity of transience is not the false security of certainty but the freedom that a sense of change allows.

Is not the freedom for which we yearn to celebrate on Pesah founded upon our capacity, and therefore our responsibility, always to be alert to the challenge of change? Each year at our sedarim, do we not summon the courage to break the chains of our slavery by waking to the ways that, in the past twelve months, we have grown enslaved? These are questions which we must ask before we come to the table, in two weeks, when the moon of Nisan will grow full.

We have two full weeks, each with a holy Shabbes at its end, to prepare ourselves to come to the table at which we are commanded to experience our own liberation. The preparation is not just a matter of cleaning shmutz from the oven. We must clean the shmutz from our souls, all that clogs our arteries with despair, that fogs our brains such that we claim to ourselves that we just do not care.

Imagine the fires on the mountaintops tonight, declaring the new moon, the moon of Nisan, here. Here, just where we are, as just as any place in the universe for a Jew, a human being, to be. We can begin once again, renewed, to exercise the human right to question.

With Rosh Hodesh Nisan we can start the spiritual practice of the first two weeks of this month. We can slow down, along the way, to savor the hours of this Shabbat and next, and then the Great Shabbat which leads this year right into our festival of freedom.

We can be ennobled by our faithfulness to the calendar of Israel. Through it, we servants of time transcend the limits of time, as, endlessly, like Abraham, we go on our way, to a place that God will show us; a place of freedom we believe, for we have experienced this freedom of the journey over and over. It is this freedom, this freedom only, which we Jews, we humans, bequeath to our children.

Yidden, Jews, spiritual people of Israel, to the Pesah table we are called, with two weeks to prepare for a mighty celebration.

Shabbat shalom. A good month of Nisan for us all.

Parashat Tzav 5768
March 22, 2008

Shabbat shalom. We are towards the beginning of Sefer Vayika, the Book of Leviticus, which means we are reading about korbonot, sacrifices, korbonot, literally ways to draw nearer to God for a variety of reasons. The Hebrew root is kuf reysh bet. To bring Jews closer to their Judaism is to m'karayv them.

One form of the korbonot was the "sin offering." Our sages have much to say in this regard. For example, questions were raised as to the relationship between sin offerings of the community and sin offerings of the individual. One Hasidic master, the Riziner, Rabbi Yisroel Friedman of Rizin, 1797 to 1850, was concerned that the Mishnah, ca. 200 ce, the first legal code after the Torah itself-Rabbi Yisroel was concerned that the Mishnah left us with a dilemma because, at one point, the Mishnah only enumerates the communal sin offerings but does not mention the sin offering of the individual. And then he proceeded solve his logical problem, by deriving from other texts, that there is a sin offering that the community brings for the individual.

It's a fascinating question-the responsibility of the community for individual sin. Apparently, the over-sexualized culture of our time had nothing to do with Elliot Spitzer's fall. Oh, well. I guess we can fall back on God's response when Moses complains that God listens better when Moses implores on behalf of the community than when Moses implores on behalf of himself. According to the midrash, God says, "The punishment that is laid upon the community is different from the punishment that is laid upon the individual, for I am not so severe in my treatment of the community as I am in dealing with an individual."

When it came to sin, the idea of the community-individual divide came easily to our sages, the ancient rabbis. What didn't come so easily, no doubt because they were all men, was a gender divide about sin. In fact, such an idea was first raised by a woman who was one of my teachers in college. In 1960, Valerie Saiving wrote and published an article called "The Human Situation: A Feminine View,"

It is arguable that Professor Saiving was the first theologian to bring the perspective of women to theological discourse about sin. No doubt, some of you here this morning, are far more familiar with women's insights into theology than I am. But sometimes it helps when a novice goes back to the basics and restates them, especially when he is a man.
Here are the words that got the discussion rolling, published in the Journal of Religion in 1960: " . . . the temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man." Men and women sin differently.

Twenty years later, Judith Plaskow built on Saiving's insight, and she and many others continue to do so. But going back to Valerie Saiving's work places us in the ideas that was plowed up with the original groundbreaking.

Here is Saiving on men and sin: ". . . man's freedom, which from another point of view can be called his individuality and his essential loneliness, brings with it a pervasive fear for the survival of the self and its values. Sin is the self's attempt to overcome that anxiety by magnifying its own power, righteousness, or knowledge. Man knows that he is merely a part of the whole, but he tries to convince himself and others that he is the whole. He tries, in fact, to become the whole. Sin is the unjustified concern of the self for its own power and prestige; it is the imperialistic drive to close the gap between the individual, separate self and others by reducing those others to the status of mere objects which can then be treated as appendages of the self and manipulated accordingly."

At the same time, in 1960, Professor Saiving described " feminine forms of sin . . ." Women's sins "have a quality which can never be encompassed by such terms as "pride" and "will to power." They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus, dependence on others for one's self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence . . . in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self."

To be sure, Professor Saiving acknowledged readily that "there is a structure of experience common to both men and women." Actually, I met her when she was lecturer on the origins of Israelite and Greek culture . But she insisted, at a time when such ideas were truly revolutionary amongst theologians,

I know this is old hat for feminists. Joy Livingston and others have been trying to get us to understand this for years in this sanctuary. Yet it bears saying again and again, because men (and some women now) continue to sin in the old fashioned men's way: with rockets and missiles and the indecencies of what passes for politics today, obsessing on their own power and dominating others.

Do women who are leaders of states, women who run for elective office-do they fall into the old androcentrism, or do they bring something different to politics as a consequence of being female? I would say it is much too early to know? But the question is a good one.

To phrase it another, theological way, is there a female understanding of the sacred, different from the male understanding, just as there is a gender distinction about sin? Here too, Professor Saiving concludes, from anthropological studies of initiation rites, that in such rites, "women do not seek to conquer a monster, death, but to participate in the sacrality of the living cosmos," to become aware of the holiness of life, and thereby sensitive to the serious ecological questions which were just coming to consciousness when Professor Saiving was writing.

I want to conclude with a final point which harkens back to last week's discussion about how we are to understand our place in Jewish history, relating it to what I have just discussed. We Jews are not passifists. For a long time, and continuing in some respects today, we have been a dominated people. One of the historic pillars of anti-Semitism was to speak of Jews as feminine in the androcentric sense of the word: weak, without a resolute experience of self.

With the insights of feminism, we have the opportunity-I'm speaking mostly to Jewish men now-to recognize the deep truths exposed by feminist theologians. Judaism is an experience of oceanic proportions. We Jews today, men and women, have the opportunity to create an understanding of sin that is sparked by the insights of feminism, is based on them, within the context of healthy theology that can be mined from the pslams and the prophets.

So, as we consider how our ancestors responded to sin through the bringing near to the altar of animal sacrifices, korbonot, let us remember these acneitn practices, not only through the lens of the ancient rabbis with all of their insight. Let us also bring to questions of sin and the nature of the holy the hard gained wisdom of such theologians as Valerie Saiving and Judith Plaskow. And who knows? Perhaps in our own time, new eyes of new generations will bring the new insights through which Torah is ever made fresh for each generation.

Shabbat shalom.

Parashat Vayikra 5768
March 15, 2008
Shabbat Zakhor
Bar mitzvah: Isaiah Mann

Shabbat shalom. Y'shar kokh'khah to Isaiah on your chanting of the Torah and Haftarah, and your carefully thought out words on this morning's lessons from Torah and Haftarah. Mazal tov to Isaiah's family, immediate and extended.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine what to say on Shabbat, but it was clear to me, several weeks ago, that this morning I would continue the discussion initiated by Isaiah, and link it to the issue of anti-Semitism which is being addressed in synagogues all over the world on this Shabbat, in response to a call from the Anti-Defamation League. There are some materials from ADL on the table outside the sanctuary, as well as a reprint of an editorial from Thursday's edition of The Jerusalem Post.

What a challenge: to hear Isaiah's call to break the cycle of revenge-what others call the cycle of violence--while insisting on an honest look at the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism.

It is precisely to this challenge, I believe, that Torah responds with words we just heard chanted from Deuteronomy: "You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget (25:19)

How to blot out the memory and not forget? We people of Israel (Jews wherever we live; indeed all people today) must resist the power of memory to terrorize, while never forgetting terror's threat to freedom.

History reveals that hatred of Israel is as much of a mystery as Israel itself. It is the barb on the hook of Jewish history. Our challenge, as it is the challenge for all humanity, is to live without getting hooked. In Isaiah's image, to stop batting the ball of hatred across the net.

Yet, would you not consider with me, that when one is assaulted, there is a measure of self respect that comes from protecting oneself? Is this not a lesson driven home to us by what happened to our people in Europe in the last century?

On this Shabbat Zakhor, this Shabbat of remembrance, along with many rabbis around the world, I would suggest that we wake up to a revival of anti-Semitism in our own time. Since the year 2000, with the United Nations' Conference on Racism, held in Durban, we have witnessed a growing assault on the existence of the State of Israel and Jews in general. In Durban, the old canard that "Zionism is racism," which was rejected at the UN after decades of assertion, once again found currency. And now, under the leadership of representatives from Libya and Cuba, Durban II-actually a continuation of Durban I-is being planned for 2009.

Rabbis for Human Rights-an organization of which I am a member-has joined others in signing a petition about Durban II which declares in part: "The global effort to eradicate racism cannot be advanced by branding whole peoples with the stigma of ultimate evil, fomenting hateful stereotyping in the name of human rights. The UN and its human rights forums must not serve as a vehicle for any form of racism, including ant-Semitism, and must bar incitement to hatred against any group in the guise of criticism of a particular government. We pledge to prevent this from happening again."

Unfortunately, it is happening all over the place. Just turn to Channel 15 and listen to the hatred towards Israel and Israelis which spews from the program sponsored by the organization Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. The other night, a member of the mainstream Protestant clergy added her voice to the slander. Nationally, voices of hatred towards Israel are being heard within the Methodist denomination as it decides whether to participate in a campaign of divestment from a company doing business with Israel.

When eight yeshiva students recently were murdered while studying in Jerusalem, murdered by a resident of east Jerusalem, it was proclaimed an heroic act by Hamas. These murders sparked celebratory gunfire and the distribution of candy in Gaza, dancing in Ramallah and Jinin, and the setting up of a mourning tent decorated with green Hamas flags by the killer's family.

Even as this has gone on, there continues to be strong pressure from the United States to negotiate with Hamas, a political party which seeks Israel's destruction. Others want to go full force into a war with Hamas which will involve many deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. Some suggest that we recognize that war already is being waged on both sides and Israel needs to increase its attacks on Hamas' leaders. Iran and other Arab states, which actually are aligned with the United States, fund Hamas' hatred and violence. Those who define this struggle as simply a cycle of violence ignore the fact, as explained by Thursday's editorial in The Jerusalem Post, that it is "a skewed process. "Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the Israeli public and political system have moved dramatically from a consensus that regards it as acceptable, even a necessity. At the same time, the Palestinians have if anything become more radicalized since 1993, and have not begun to prepare themselves for a two-state approach, let alone embrace it."

From the distance of six thousand miles, we are not personally threatened by the rockets and missiles falling on Sderot and Ashkelon, and predicted soon to be coming to Tel Aviv. It is not for us to make easy judgments. We read many different things. The Jerusalem Post reported this past Tuesday that an Egyptian-brokered truce has been reached between Israel and Hamas, according to a senior Israeli security official. Around the same time, Israel's Defense Minister was suggesting that Israeli troops would have to go back into Gaza in the near future.

How do we sort out legitimate security concerns from the virus of revenge that Isaiah warns us against? Calls for revenge are in the air, on all sides. The Palestinian press is full of hateful calls for eliminating Israel. The President of Iran wants to kill Jews. We ourselves hear a cry for revenge from our own people.

"The people directly affected by the deadly terrorist attack on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva-this is from a report in the Israeli press-"the people directly affected by the terrorist attack . . . are not just the students, their relatives and friends, but the much wider larger segment of the religious Zionist public. This segment of the population, already seething with anger, which started with the Disengagement in 2005 . . . , the government promises to America to remove illegal outposts, the continued diplomatic process launched at Annapolis and its emphasis to talk about all topics, including Jerusalem, is going to be extremely unhappy about this attack. Together with the grief and sorrow, there is going to be a lot of angry talk about good and evil, about a religious war over the Holy Land.

"Many of the top leadership of the religious Zionist movement, speaking at the funerals, spoke of revenge of the blood. The fact that the Jewish students were killed in a house of God touched the most basic nerve of many Israelis, and especially of the religious Zionist public."

The situation is confused. On the one hand, we have reports of negotiations with Hamas. On the other hand, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who had been going out on a limb, talking with the Palestinians about dividing Jerusalem, said last Sunday that "Israel is obligated to respond to terror, and every process must offer a unilateral response to its security needs. The creation of a Palestinian state is not the required answer to Israel's security needs." Israel's Defense Minister suggests that Israeli troops will have to return to Gaza.

Speaking on Wednesday at a special session of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Ms. Livni said:

"I want to make it absolutely clear; we don't want to punish innocent people. The death of a child-any child, Palestinian or Israeli-is a terrible loss. But there should be a moral distinction between those who conduct suicide missions deliberately against women and children and those who do their best to avoid hurting the innocent, even if sometimes it happens in the midst of battle. There should be a distinction as well between those who glorify death, Jihad and martyrdom, on the one hand, and those who cherish life and humanity, on the other."

Ambassador Yitzhak Levanon, who has spoken from this pulpit when he was consul general in Boston, is now Permanent Representative of Israel in Geneva to the UN Human Rights Council. Ambassador Levanon recently responded to a resolution passed by the Human Rights Council, condemning Israel's incursion into Gaza with the loss of 130 lives, half of them cxivilians:

"The tuth is, that the Hamas terrorists took over the Gaza Strip by force, and established an irredentist entity. That, they have smuggled lethal weapons into this territory with the sole purpose to kill Israelis. That, since the beginning of this year, in only two months, they have fired 671 missiles at civilians, women and children. That, they received these missiles from countries in the Middle East . . . That, Hamas is . . . collectively punishing a population of a quarter of a million citizens living in Ashkelon, Sderot, the Negev and Netivot. That, they call for the physical destruction of my country and translate these words into deeds . . . That Israel has left no stone unturned in our attempts to alert the international community that the situation is untenable. . . . And the world remained silent." Indeed, the UN Security Council was blocked by Libya from condemning the murder and maiming of teen-age rabbinical students.

My colleague and former fellow rabbinical student Rabbi Daniel Gordis, in a piece circulated by the Jewish Agency, bemoans the fact that the State of Israel, which was supposed to insure that Jews would never again be sitting ducks in the face of violent assault, now is meek and unable to protect its citizens.

On this Shabbat Zakhor, we need to wake up to the situation Jews now are in. We mourn the loss of the lives of all innocents. All life is sacred. We want an end to all the bloodshed. We pray for the blood-letting to cease. We want to live in peace in the Middle East and, indeed, all over the world.

We are sensitive to the loss of innocent lives of Palestinians. We reject revenge. Many, though not all of us reject, as a form of revenge, Prime Minister Olmert's decision to build more housing in the territories. Some in Israel cry out for building one hundred apartments in the territories for each of the yeshiva students murdered.

Our God is not a vengeful God. We did not survive the Holocaust to fall prey to the bitterness and hatred of revenge. Just the same, let us know, deep in our hearts, that what is going on in the Middle East is far more than a case of tit for tat acts of violence. The intention of Israel's enemies, as ever, is to strike a blow against our existence. Sheikh Raed Salah, a leading Islamic cleric said this past Monday at a press conference in Jerusalem, "The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here."

And it's not just the Islamists. The military wing of Mahmood Abbas' Fatah claimed responsibility last month for rockets attacks on Israelis. Just a few days before the attack on the yeshiva, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, in Arabic, that he is against terrorist attacks only for tactical reasons "at this time" and that, "in the future, things may change." He said, "I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965," and bragged about Fatah having trained Hezbollah.

We can condemn particular policies of the State of Israel, and sometimes, as a matter of conscience, insist on such criticism. Israel's own citizens readily criticize their government. I myself have stood with Palestinians as their house was unjustly demolished. I have picked olives with Palestinian farmers under attack by violent Israeli settlers. I know the pain of the Palestinians.

But let us not fool ourselves into equating the existential situation of Jews living in the Middle East with, say, that of Americans relating to Iraq. We Jews are still defending our very lives. Let us blot out the memory of Amalak and never forget. Wherever we live, we must resist the power of memory to terrorize us, while never forgetting terror's threat to freedom, and, indeed, to our very lives.

Shabbat shalom.