Blog

There is a tradition in Judaism of keeping two statements in ones’ pockets. On one piece of paper it says, “for me the world was created.” On the other it says, “I am but dust and ashes.” According to the Talmud , we are supposed to take time to reflect every day of the incredible Divine potential implanted within each and every one of us. And that it is up to us to bring that Divine potential to life. At the same time, we are also to remind ourselves that we are mortal. That time is finite. But I think more than that, it is to remind us of how mortality is a gift, and of the preciousness of not only our lives, but the lives of those around us as well. 

And we keep these two statements in our pockets to remind us of how, we as Jews, are always living in tension. For example, when we pray, we have the kevah, the set prayers we recite each time we gather. Tonight we heard the haunting melody of Kol Nidre. But it is only haunting if we let the melody touch our souls. This is because prayers are just words unless we bring the kavannah, the intention, the passion, the heart’s desire to those words. Our worship service is designed to live within this tension of the fixed versus the intention to help us navigate through the ebbs and flows of the prayer experience.

So too it is with our inherited interpretive tradition that has been sustaining the Jewish people for over 2,000 years since the rise of Rabbinic Judaism. There are the fixed rules, halacha that help guide our observances and practices. But there is also the intent behind those rules. For example, kashrut at its core is about what we consume. But at its heart, it is about not only what we eat, but being grateful for the food we have and the company to enjoy it with. It is about elevating the act of eating to a holy act. And to focus on one, can cause us to lose sight of the other. It is not just about the food, but also the ethics of the food and finding hakarat hatov, the gratitude for having it as well.

But I did not come here tonight to talk merely about the tensions of kevah and kavanah or halacha versus intent, rather, I also wanted to speak about a tension many of us are struggling with; namely: what does it means to be Jewish here, in the United States, and how that tension is having a greater and greater impact on our lives and how it is also impacting our community.

To start, Jews have been here since the days of Columbus. Though some have speculated that Columbus came from Jewish origins, there is no definitive proof to this claim. However, given his initial voyage took place in 1492, the same year Jews were expelled from Spain, it should come as no surprise that some with him were either Jewish or were very recent conversos, who sought to flee Spain. As a recent article states, “Among the 90 crewmen of Spaniards and Moors were also a few people of Jewish origin. They included two experienced sailors, Roderigo de Triana and Alfonso de la Calle; a physician, Maestre Bernal; a surgeon by the name of Marco, and Queen Isabella’s personal inspector, Roderigo Sanchez de Segovia. Probably the most high-profile Jew on board who had recently converted to Christianity by force was Luis de Torres, an interpreter for the governor of Murcia. As a result of his knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and other ancient languages, Columbus thought his linguistic skills would be useful in communicating with the locals.” 

Ever since 1492 Jews have been a part of the Americas, though most of them came here as individuals and did not establish communities. The first known colony was in 1654, when a group of Jews fleeing the Inquisition arrived in New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil. Despite protests from the colony’s Director General Peter Stuyvesant, these refugees were allowed to remain. It probably didn’t hurt that some of the largest investors in the Dutch West India Company were Jewish. These 23 refugees were allowed to remain as long as they did not become a burden to the colony.

And so we have been here ever since. The earliest communities were mostly Sephardic. They established synagogues in places like New York, Savannah, Newport, Charleston, and Philadelphia. But there were always tensions. There were always conditions. There were occasional questions of loyalty, and Jews were often suspect in this fledgling part of the world. Often a vestige from Europe.

Nonetheless, we found opportunities to thrive and participate in the great American experiment. For example, we have fought in every war this nation has faced. We fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War. We fought each other in the Civil War. And yes, there were Jewish slave owners. But, and I must emphasize this point, Jews did not create nor were we responsible for the Slave Trade.  Sadly, a libelous claim that persists to this very day.

To demonstrate how we have been accepted here, we often refer to George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, which he wrote in 1791 stating in part, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support…

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”  This letter all the more remarkable especially if you think about how we were treated throughout the history of our time in Europe.

But, despite all of our successes, despite all of our integration into American society, we have always been in tension between being fully Jewish and fully American. The largest group of Jews, including most of us, can trace our ancestry to our parents, or our grandparents, or our great-grandparents fleeing Europe between the 1880s to the 1920s. They fled persecution. They fled pogroms. They fled for a better life. Sadly, we know what happened to those who remained. 

But this nation, which prides itself on welcoming immigrants with open arms, was very nervous about the so-called ‘unwashed’ ‘uneducated’ masses. And facing an onslaught of ‘undesirables,’ closed its doors with the Immigration Act of 1924. Yes, the law was mostly targeting Jews.

In many cities there were redlines of where Jews could live. Baltimore, where I served as a rabbi for 6 years, is still grappling with its anti-Jewish and anti-Black housing laws. There were quotas on colleges and professions. This is in part why we created Hollywood and the Comic Book, the musical comedy, and were heavily involved in the development with Jazz. Not because we were such a creative people, but because those were the only opportunities afforded to us. We created our own country clubs and built our own hospitals to train our own doctors. And we even established some of our own universities to educate our young. 

Nonetheless, there was an expectation both amongst ourselves and by the larger community that ultimately we would fully assimilate into American culture. There is a saying that the largest collection of tefillin can be found in the East River as Jews cast aside the trappings of Judaism as soon as they arrived on these shores. And we have been told over and over again, to be Jewish in the synagogue but not to be ‘too Jewish’ when it comes to the outside world.

We can even see it today in shows like Seinfeld. Clearly all the main characters, except perhaps for Kramer, are clearly Jewish. George, in particular, was clearly a stereotypical New York Jew, but in an effort to make the show have broader appeal, they made him Italian. “According to historian Jeffry Shandler,  the masking of Jews on television has created “crypto-Jews” —  characters who, “while nominally identified as having some other ethnicity or religion, are nonetheless regarded [by some viewers and even some creators] as Jews in disguise.” In Shandler’s view, such crypto-Jews are a sign of the “ethnic relativism” that marks much of contemporary American culture.”  Be Jewish, but not too Jewish.

Despite this tension, we managed to become the most successful Diaspora community in our history. For many, the United States became our new Tzion, our new Zion. It was common in many Reform congregations to hear rabbis preach against immigration to British Palestine because we do not need a return of the State of Israel, as we have our new home. But for some, this message was too much, as they had dreams of building and returning to Israel.

This tension actually split a handful of congregations across the country including most famously Beth Israel which saw a break off of 200 families to form Temple Emanuel in Houston. As Rabbi David Lyon wrote about his community , it was a tension, a rift, that tore apart not only a community, but also families that took decades to heal. And yes, we feel a similar tension in our own community today. A tension we are struggling with over how it means to continue to be in relationship even if it feels like the world is trying to tear us apart. 

And this is the tension we live in today, which has come to the forefront even more so since the events of October 7th. And that is in part because we, as Jews, have always been suspect throughout our wanderings. I was reminded of this as I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently, Torah Smash, the world seems to want to have a supervillain, a role we Jews have been cast into for generations. As Dr. Deborah Lipstadt has so eloquently stated, antisemitism is the world’s oldest conspiracy theory.

If you need us be guilty of deicide, so be it, we killed god. We killed children to use their blood to make matzah, never mind that murder is a violation of the 10 Commandments and halacha prohibits the consumption of blood. We are communists. We are globalists. We control the media. We control the weather. We control world events. We are all powerful. Yet we are also lazy and incompetent. We are white genocidal colonialists, and yet we are non-white disruptors and threats to the establishment. There is no consistency. We merely are cast as the villain over and over again for whatever role the world and the hate mongers need us to be. 

But this is not about antisemitism, this is about us. The problem is we have started to let these hate-filled stereotypes and accusations enter into our own conversations with and about each other. To be in tension means we cannot, we must not, let others define who we are, even as we live in the tension of what it means to be Jewish, to be American, to be human, and to be in community.

To live in this tension also means being Jewish is all joy and no fun. We have competing desires, competing values, competing hopes, competing dreams, and competing fears. Some of us want to live fully in our new Zion, our home here in America. Others embrace the Tikvah, the hope that Israel represents for us now and for the future. Some of us live in between the two, and some of us are just trying to make it from one day to the next. But what we cannot do, we cannot let these tensions tear us
apart or to tear apart our community. And we cannot let them diminish our ability to leave meaningful, full Jewish lives no matter where we find ourselves.

This is because world we live in continually tells us over and over again our place as Jews, where we belong and were we don’t belong. And I’ll be honest. I have had enough of it. Being Jewish does not mean you have narrowly define things for yourself. When it is done right, it is about creativity. It is about exploration. It is about questioning. And perhaps, most importantly, it is about curiosity. We get to define it for ourselves, and we should never cede that power to others. We are already living with enough pain and enough hurt to keep handing that power over to others. 

So where do we go from here? In the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was asked in an interview about how she can possibly move forward after her son was killed. She replied, “There are people who walked out of Auschwitz and went on to have a good life. They never forgot their parents and their siblings and their spouses and their children who they lost there. But they went out and they decided — and it took tremendous effort — and they had good lives.”

“And there are people who walked out of Auschwitz and never left Auschwitz,” she added.

“We’re in mourning. We’re suffering, but we are making a choice personally that we are going to live life. We need to do it for ourselves. We need to do it for our daughters, and we need to do it because Hersh would want us to, so we will live life.” 

As we gather this evening asking to be sealed into the book of life, invoking the words of Kol Nidre, All Vows; we stood as one community asking to be forgiven for the sins that we will commit this coming year, not for the sins we committed this past year. It is a curious notion, which is why many Jewish theologians and communal leaders have struggled with Kol Nidre over the generations. But the more I reflect on it, the more I embrace it because it reminds us of how we are here in tension with the past, the present, and the future. It is up to each of us to find the best path forward.

I do not stand here today to tell you the correct path because each of us must make our own way. What I am here to tell you is that Temple Israel, your Temple Israel can be a home base for your Jewish journeys. Cantor Alexander, Rabbi Berezin and I are but caretakers in your over 150 year old congregational family and community. There were those who came before us, and God-willing, there will be those who follow us. Some were giants and some were but wayfarers in this long illustrious history. But we are ready to stand beside you as you, as we, grapple with all of these tensions.

We are all feeling the strain. We are all feeling the pull. We are all feeling the discomfort. We are all feeling a little lost and a little lonely. We are all grieving over the tremendous losses of life. And we are all struggling with what it means to live authentic Jewish lives that embody our core values.

Let’s be honest, living authentic, meaningful Jewish lives is hard. To be Jewish means living in two worlds. The worlds between tradition and modernity. To live between kevah and kavannah. To live between observance and authenticity. To live between being American and being Jewish. To live between at least two differing understandings of Tzion. And to live in the tension between joy and sorrow. 

Recognizing all of this, to borrow from Rachel Goldberg-Polin, now is the time to keep living. L’chaim, to life. This does not mean we abandon the hurts of the past or ignore the pains of the present. It does not mean we inure ourselves against the tragedies that continue to befall our world. Even as we celebrate our joys we will continue to find pathways to comfort each other in our sorrows. Even as we celebrate our heritage we will continue to shout out about our frustrations, hurts, and disappointments with and through our complicated tradition. 

But there is also a greater need as well. To this end we need to keep searching for, exploring, and ultimately embracing the pathways to keep leading meaningful, authentic, Jewish lives no matter where we find ourselves on this journey. For it is by navigating all of these tensions, we may very well find the pathway home. For as our pockets remind us: for me the world was created and I am but dust and ashes.

L'Shanah Tovah.

--

Watch the entirety of Friday’s service here.

Temple Talk is a recap of sermons given from the Bimah for those who missed a Sermon or who wanted to revisit the words spoken at a previous sermon.