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I was far more committed to the first three issues than to the fourth. In fact, at that time, anti-Semitic incidents were declining, year to year, and seen by many law enforcement officials as something that represented a fringe phenomenon in the U.S. While I was very much in favor of educational programs and events to commemorate the Shoah, I thought that too much attention was being paid by the organized Jewish community to the threat of anti-Semitism, relying on a narrative that was more accurate for my parent’s generation than for mine. I often felt that the “anti-Semitism card” was employed as a strategy by Jewish organizations to mobilize Jewish solidarity and identity. While often effective, I questioned the wisdom of the strategy.  

How things have changed! The ADL reported that in 2022, there was a 36% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. over the previous year. Campus and school incidents were up by 50%. And there were 91 bomb threats targeting Jewish institutions. There are many ways to explain the phenomenon but, in my view, chief among them was having a President of the United States who played to the most tribal fears of Americans by scapegoating immigrants and non-white Americans. After the Unite the Right Rally, organized by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017, when marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us”, President Donald Trump announced, ominously, that there were “good people on both sides” at the rally!

I hasten to add that Jews are not the only people at risk in America today. One of the seminal commentators on prejudice and intolerance in America is Eric Ward, the executive vice-president of Race Forward. Eric has written and spoken eloquently about the synergy between racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia in America. They are all of one piece and, because they are, we must respond by forming alliances. No group should face intolerance alone.  

History is replete with examples of what happens to societies when major public figures, no less a head of state, gives a wink and a nod to extremist rhetoric and behavior. There is a direct line between Donald Trump’s comments after the Unite the Right Rally and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. It is sobering to think how close American democracy came to being undermined on that day. And, despite aggressive prosecution of the January 6^th actors by the Department of Justice, the poisonous hatred that long existed on the fringes of American society, is now enjoying unprecedented status, attracting all kinds of individuals who have grievances about their social, economic or political status. Nazi Germany is not the only example of what happens when a dictator suggests that all the problems in a country are the fault of some minority group.

Jews and people of conscience cannot sit on the sidelines in the current environment. There are many efforts underway, both nationally and in communities across the country, to build bridges of understanding across lines of difference, be it religious, racial, ideological or ethnic. America is a pluralistic democracy. Teachers, clergy, elected officials and ordinary citizens must condemn all expressions of hatred and intolerance, whenever it rears its ugly head. We must seek out and/or create settings in which people can discuss hot button issues but do so in a way that is respectful and motivated by curiosity and not accusation. Finally, we must reject anyone running for public office who peddles in divisive rhetoric, pitting one set of Americans against another.

One of the core Jewish values is represented by the word echad, the word at the end of the Shma prayer. The word suggests that we must create a world that reflects Cosmic Unity, another way of speaking about God or the transcendent oneness of the world. It is not dissimilar from the Latin phrase on U.S. currency, E Pluribus Unum, out of the many, we can and must be, One.  

I love hearing about the various ways that people conduct their seders. We have had the custom for years of starting the first hour in our family room to discuss one theme in depth before we take our places around the dining room table with all the symbolic foods and ritual objects. This year we talked about how Ukrainian Jews took part in seders, under the most challenging, wartime conditions. The story about how the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Federation system as well as Chabad, made Passover foods and seders possible is a story that can and should be told for years to come. Many Ukrainian Jews that never before had a seder made a point to attend one this year—both an act of defiance against their Russian invaders and an expression of their cultural identity.

Of course, the extent to which world Jewry and the organizations that represent it, mobilized to support the Ukrainian Jewish community should be a great source of pride for all Jews. Kol Yisrael areivim, zeh b’azeh, “all Jews are responsible, one for the other” is not only a motto from the Talmud, it has served as a rallying cry for Jews to act on for centuries.

In the late 1980’s, I was at a fundraising dinner in Washington D.C. A civil war was raging in Lebanon between Christians and Muslims and there were thousands of Lebanese dying in the conflict. My tablemate was a Lebanese Christian ex-pat, living in the U.S. He bemoaned the fact that not a single Muslim or Christian NGO, anywhere in the world, was lifting a finger to help their co-religionists with humanitarian aid. Knowing that I was a rabbi he added with admiration, “Jews would never allow this to happen to their own.”

May the work of “redemption,” that is the theme of Pesach, continue.  

The Jews I met in Russia during that fateful summer inspired me. The risks they took to affirm their Judaism and to agitate for the right to emigrate to the State of Israel seemed like a page out of the most heroic episodes of Jewish history. Like generations that came before them, Soviet Jews refused to let government authorities rob them of their spiritual birthright. Upon my return home to New York, I began, what would become, a lifelong commitment to being an activist for Soviet Jewry and, by extension, for human rights and liberty around the world. The Soviet Jewry part of that story came to a climax when I helped to organize the historic Summit Rally for Soviet Jewry on December 6, 1987 behind the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. It was the day before Soviet Premier, Mikail Gorbachev was to meet U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the White House. At the time, I was the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Washington D.C. and those twin events would put in motion a change in policy that led to more than a million Russian Jews leaving their country to emigrate to Israel and points west.  It would also bring about the total collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
About a month ago I was contacted by the person who led my first trip to visit Jews behind the Iron Curtain, Rabbi Jonathan Porath. “Johnny” as I had always called him, had just published a book about his lifelong crusade to support the Jews of Russia. Here We All Are: 175 Russian-Jewish Journeys tells the story not only of the five USY summer programs that Johnny led, but of what came next. I have often bemoaned how poorly the Jewish community has told the Soviet Jewry story. For most Jews who are a generation behind me, the story is hardly known. And yet, the story is filled with heroic Soviet Jewish personalities like Natan Sharansky, Ida Nudel and Yuli Edelstein and of a Jewish community that used political influence, grassroots organizing and thousands of visits into the Soviet Union to, essentially, save Soviet Jewry.
 
As for what came next, Johnny’s book tells it beautifully. Johnny made aliya to Israel with his family. When tens of thousands of Jews from the FSU (former Soviet Union) started coming to Israel in the early 1990’s, Johnny organized his community in the Ramot Alef section of Jerusalem to help them. Like in hundreds of Israeli neighborhoods around the country, average citizens helped Russian Jews find apartments, furnish them with appliances and furniture, connect them with jobs and school and much, much more.
 
In 1993, Johnny was invited to join the staff of the Joint Distribution Committee where he became responsible to help build an infrastructure for the Jewish community that remained in the FSU. This is a story that even I, knew only in the faintest of details. Johnny tells the story about how he and the JDC helped to build schools, synagogues, community centers across a territory of thousands of miles. The JDC even helped to create a national office to promote the academic study of Judaism in the FSU called SEFER (the Hebrew word for “book”). In so many cases, Johnny was working with Jews at this stage of his career who he had first met twenty years earlier, when he was leading USY groups like the one I participated in.
 
All in all, Johnny’s book tells a tale about the spirit of resilience and fortitude to survive that has been a hallmark of our people’s history for millenia. And it tells the story of one man, Rabbi Jonathan Porath, who made a difference.

Now I know that in this situation an Orthodox rabbi would pray to God. I considered that for a moment and quickly dismissed the thought. Instead, I posted to the Adat Shalom listserv. Almost the same thing. So, in the middle of August, on a weekday night at 6:18pm I posted a request on our listserv for some Trekkies to identify themselves to me to help me with an inquiry. By 6:45pm, I had five volunteers, four of whom joined a Zoom call I set up for 8pm that same night! I described the episode and within minutes, I had the citation: Star Trek: Original Series, Season 3, episode 7 in the year 1969. The name of the episode was called, “The Day of the Dove”. Thank you, Helen Avner, for finding this needle in a digital haystack. This sermon, “The Torah of Captain Kirk”, is dedicated to you.

By the way, by noon the next day, I had another dozen Adat Shalom Trekkies emailing me with offers to help! If only it was so easy to get members to sign up for oneg duty!

***

Stardate: The 9^th of Tishrei, 5783 (that is tonight!). Have you noticed how, with each passing year, it seems harder to cope with the things that life is sending our way? It goes from the mundane to the cataclysmic.

The mundane ledger includes online application forms that you can spend 2-3 hours on and then the entire form disappears and you have to start over (show of hands). Or, calling a company or a government agency, navigating through five levels of robot voices, finally getting a human on the line and then having the phone line go dead? (show of hands)

Now it is possible that I am getting crankier and more short-tempered as I age, but I swear, I don’t remember these things happening in the 20^th century.

The cataclysmic side of the ledger is a lot more serious and is definitely is not affected by any alleged crankiness on my part. Climate change is real and we may have already passed the point of no return. Scientists project that we are likely to have 200 million climate refugees by the year 2050, people fleeing their homes because of drought, flood or natural disasters, all a consequence of global warming. Second example: The January 6^th hearings have documented how we were but a hairbreadth away from a coup that would have ended our democracy as we know it. Third example: Despite millions of words written and spoken about the toxic polarization in our country that plays out from the halls of Congress to the local school board in Nebraska, no one seems to have a concrete plan of how we emerge from our dysfunctional political climate.

This summer Sandy and I spent a week at the Chautauqua Institute. (It was only a week later that Salman Rushdie was horrifically stabbed on the amphitheatre stage in front of hundreds of people.) For our week, the theme was “The Future of Democracy” and, as usual, the speakers were nationally prominent academics, journalists and policy experts. The formula after several days became familiar: 40 minutes of disastrous news followed by an anemic, 5 minute “optimistic ending” to close the talk. One speaker, Anthea Butler, an African-American professor of American Religion at the University of Pennsylvania was refreshingly honest. To an audience that was 99% white, she said: “I am exhausted; I am tired of fighting. My people have been fighting a system that was rigged against us for 400 years. Now the problem is at your doorstep. Your turn to figure it out; your turn to fight.”   

It might have been a bit too much truth for most of the audience to hear. And yet, I hear a lot of that fatigue among activists I know who have been in the trenches for a long time and who are having a hard time, “keeping the faith”. In my own circle of acquaintances, it is not uncommon for the response to the umpteenth bad news story, to be: “The world is coming to an end.” The reactions make me scared for our future!

Which brings me to the Torah of Captain Kirk and the episode, The Day of the Dove. The episode starts with a small force of Klingons, the arch enemies of humans, being captured by Captain Kirk and beamed up to the Starship Enterprise where they are being held as prisoners. But an alien life force made up of pure energy with the power to manipulate both mind and matter, takes control of the ship. All laser guns turn into primitive swords and most of the crew of the Enterprise gets locked behind doors that won’t open so that there are the same number of humans and Klingons in a circumscribed area who are in perpetual battle with one another. In the story, when anyone gets mortally wounded, they recover in a matter of hours so that the battle will never end. Members of each side accuse the other side of past atrocities that may have never taken place. Nonetheless, each side is convinced that the other side is evil embodied and must be destroyed.

Is this sounding at all familiar? I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode! I am talking about how art imitates life or, in this case, how art anticipated our current reality.

With the help of Spock, Captain Kirk realizes that the alien energy force on the ship gets larger and stronger as the hatred and fighting intensifies. He realizes that the alien is actually the catalyst for the conflict because it needs conflict to thrive. The humans and Klingons are but pawns in a cycle of recrimination, hatred and violence that will last for eternity unless the cycle can be broken. As the Enterprise is within minutes of exploding due to the deterioration of its dilithium crystals, Kirk convinces the Klingon leader, Kang, that it is in their mutual interest to stop all fighting if they are going to survive at all. Kang is convinced and, in eerily prophetic fashion, states: “only a fool continues to fight in a burning house”. With that, Kirk and Kang embrace, their respective crews, surprised, but inspired by their leaders, throw down their swords and the alien energy force gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappears from the Starship Enterprise.

I was not just being cute to name this sermon, “The Torah of Captain Kirk”. I didn’t do it just because the two heroes are Jewish actors named William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Rather, the episode I just summarized has some powerful Jewish messages.

The rabbis recognized a truth about human nature when they wrote about the good and bad inclination that is part of our psychological makeup. It was not an accident that they added a “hey” to yetzer ha-ra, as compared to yetzer tov. The rabbis knew that the evil inclination in us is stronger than our good inclination. The entire body of mitzvot, both ritual and ethical commandments, are understood as a training program to help us overcome our evil inclination.

Similarly, the entire body of Musar literature, developed in the late Medieval period in Europe, was designed to cultivate positive “soul-traits” so that we might overcome our evil inclinations. Musar developed disciplines that raised up certain character virtues/midot such as: nedivut/generosity, anavah/humility, and emet/truth-telling so that people could live more ethical, purposeful lives.

The rabbis’ understanding of human nature anticipated by a couple of thousand years the discipline of positive psychology, that began in the late 20^th century. Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania has been the best-known advocate of positive psychology. He noted how the human mind is wired to be alert to that which might threaten our survival. He felt that much too much therapy focuses on dealing with negative experiences. This leads to a mindset of hopelessness.  Practitioners of positive psychology advocate that we make peace with our past, no matter how bad or traumatic it may have been, and focus on contentment with our present circumstances and optimism about our future.

This year I took an online course on Musar with Rabbi Shai Held of Hadar. We studied a book of Musar with which I was unfamiliar, Midot v’Avodat ha-Shem, (Ethical Traits and Serving God), written by Rabbi Chaim Friedlander in the late 19^th century. The book contains this amazing passage: “The amount of chesed/lovingkindness one sees in the world, corresponds to the amount of chesed one embodies.”  

It took a while for the importance of this teaching to sink into my head. Everyday we make choices about what we “see”. Seeing something, raises it up in our consciousness and, once on our minds, we are inclined to react to that which we see.

So, what are we “seeing” and “hearing”? News outlets make money when people watch or read their content. The more sensational media outlets can make the news, the higher the profits. In the new book, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, author Chris Stirewalt explains how accurate reporting has taken a back seat to what industry insiders call “emotionally charged product”. The news media has taken a page from the playbook of social media companies which have made billions of dollars by stoking conflict, creating good guys and bad guys, offering conspiracy theories, and having every post suggest that the consequence of the story is a threat to your well-being or that of our planet. The net result is that we choose the news media that aligns with our own biases and we become convinced that the bad guys on the other side have to be defeated at all costs.

Captain Kirk realized that this downward spiral of demonization, hatred and violence between humans and Klingons would spell doom for both species. He had the wisdom to break the downward spiral by doing the unexpected and reaching out to his sworn enemy.

When our yetzer ha-ra is allowed free reign over our thoughts and actions, we reinforce the worst tendencies in our society. Rabbi Friedlander’s teaching tells us that we need to look for the good in people, the good in our society and yes, even the good in those we might see as our adversaries or enemies. In Hebrew this is called, hakarat ha-tov, recognizing the good in everyone and everything. Only when we do that, can we begin to embody those same good qualities, break the downward spiral and then, possibly, to enjoy the beauty of life again.  

Here again I want to hold up how this Jewish teaching anticipates some hard social scientific research. Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard has been arguing for 20 years that despite what we read in the news and on social media, things are, actually, getting better in the world. His books, The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) are filled with charts showing worldwide improvements in mortality rates, ending poverty, decline in armed conflicts, protection of the rights of minorities and much more. Why isn’t this making the news?

I always try to end my sermons with a “to-do” list so that if you have been moved by my message, you can not only talk about it with others but you might take some steps towards embodying it in the world, much in the spirit of Chaim Friedlander’s teaching about chesed in the world.  

1. Cut back on your use and consumption of social media and televised news. Each feeds on extremism and conflict just like the alien force on the Starship Enterprise. It is addicting and it is toxic!! It will not improve your life. It may entertain and titillate but it is as bad for your brain as smoking is to your lungs. 279 birthday wishes on Facebook does not make up for the one post in which you learn that a close friend didn’t invite you to his or her birthday party. The resulting jealousy and anger that you then feel is harmful to your relationships and poison to your soul.
2. Re-purpose the time you save by getting off social media and avoiding televised news and, instead, find a local service project where you can work with other people who are committed to helping those who are vulnerable and in need. We are the fortunate ones. Helping others is the kind of act of tikkun, repairing the torn fabric of our world, that is a healing balm for both the giver and the receiver.
3. Check out the website: Conspiracy of Goodness. It is filled with stories, both big and small, of acts of courage, ingenuity and generosity happening in the world. This is what we need to see and hear about a whole lot more about! This is what should be informing and inspiring us. Remember: The amount of chesed, lovingkindness you see in the world, corresponds to the amount of chesed you will embody.

I suspect that there may be a good many skeptics in this room who might feel that my message is a retreat from activism and engagement with serious issues that require our time, money and attention. It is nothing of the sort. It rather is a shofar blast that reminds us that we cannot create a better future for ourselves and for our children without a sense of gratitude for what we have and a doubling down on hope and optimism. That is the only way our ancestors were able to survive circumstances far more difficult and life-threatening than anything that we currently face.

We need to channel the Torah of Captain Kirk, realizing how we, ourselves, might be perpetuating a downward spiral in our relationships and in society at large. We must have the wisdom and courage to recognize that and change our behavior.

May 5783 be a year for positive thinking and a renewed commitment to seeing and manifesting goodness. Live long and prosper.

When we became empty nesters, I knew that I needed to move to a lighter sukkah. I no longer had my kids to help me move the large, 4×8 wood panels with lattice from my garage to the backyard. I was thrilled to “gift” our sukkah to a single mom who was a member of our synagogue and her teenaged daughter, where it got a second life. When I helped Cheryl and Eliana build that sukkah in their backyard, I felt like a million bucks. Me, who finds a trip to the hardware store very intimidating, giving direction on the construction. Who would have guessed!

Our new, lightweight sukkah, came in a kit. It still requires a few people to assemble but it is far easier than my original one. But I did not buy the bamboo roof add on, assuming that I could rig something up on my own. On the front end, I saved $65. I have now spent hundreds of dollars and untold hours over several years to figure out a good way to hold the schach on the sukkah roof. I am too proud to now buy the $65 bamboo kit. This week I came up with my third design in five years, weaving twine between the roof poles. I thought it was a brilliant solution until I discovered how quickly 300’ of twine can get knotted. So, I spent several hours with my daughter, Jenny, unknotting twine, again and again, until we finished our twine weave.

It never fails. Each year that I assemble my sukkah, I am reminded of one of Mordecai Kaplan’s lesser-known books called The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion. In it, Kaplan has a chapter on each Jewish festival, and he brilliantly builds a case for each holiday without centering God’s supernatural powers, which he did not believe in. He titles the chapter on Sukkot, “God as the Power that Makes for Cooperation”. Indeed, it is impossible to build a sukkahby yourself, as I have learned the hard way over many years. 

I see Kaplan’s insight manifested when I join together with other members of our congregation who come together to build our congregation’s sukkah. When I was growing up at our Conservative synagogue on Long Island, I’d join my Dad to help build the congregational sukkah. It was sponsored by the synagogue’s Men’s Club and it was, definitely, a male-only affair. When we founded Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD in the late 1980’s, we intentionally avoided creating a Sisterhood and Men’s Club. The community, since its founding, has had a strong volunteer ethos including weekly, volunteer-led shabbat lunches, with each member being required to prepare and serve several onegs a year, often with 100-150 people in attendance. Sure enough, each year, women, men, teens and children turn out to build our communal sukkah. Is it heretical for the founding rabbi of a congregation to admit that he enjoys building the sukkah more than Sukkot services?

We live in a society that has automated almost everything. The explosion of on-line shopping has even toppled one of the iconic symbols of American society, the shopping mall. Similar to the argument made by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone that the decline of bowling leagues is a metaphor for the breakdown of America’s social fabric, everywhere we look we see reasons why we have become such a polarized society. There are fewer and fewer places where we come together, meet our neighbors and learn how to live cooperatively. America’s pluralistic democracy was built on the strength of the “public square”, where people from different ethnic, religious, political backgrounds could come together, see each other as human beings and, together, work to advance the common good. That public square has all but vanished in American and we are much poorer for it.

Increasingly, I like to describe Judaism as radically counter-cultural. My parent’s generation, many of whom were immigrants to this country, were eager to talk about how Judaism and Americanism were in harmony. It suited their need to fit in and feel like “real” Americans. My generation, and certainly that of my children, no longer has to prove that we belong in America. We are, however, challenged to make the case that Judaism has a place in our lives.

The case is simple. No society can long endure if it cannot find ways to bring people together to do something constructive for the common good. Judaism starts with community. It cannot be done alone. Just try to build a sukkah, and you will see why.

Chag sameach.

With the Department of Justice in the midst of its largest ever investigation and prosecution of a single incident and a Congressional inquiry still ongoing, there are still many details of the January 6^th assault that have yet to be revealed. But at this, one-year anniversary, at least four major contributing factors can be identified.

1. Xenophobia (fear of strangers, foreigners, the “other”): White America feels itself “at risk.” By 2045, Whites will be less than 50% of U.S. population. Hispanics, Blacks, Asians and multi-racials are seen as threats by many White Americans. Those fears are easily exploited by politicians who feed such fears and generate legions of followers through the politics of hate. The origins of racism in this country was rooted in the desire to keep “the other” –in this case, Africans brought to this country in chains and sold into slavery–economically and politically impotent. Think about the chant that was heard at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA: “Jews will not replace us”.
2. The appeal of autocrats: Globalization has upended the economies of the world. There is much economic dislocation afoot, as whole industries are threatened. It paves the way for autocrats who prey on people’s fears, paint complex issues in black and white, and position themselves as “saviors”. Donald Trump may be the highest profile example of the rise of authoritarian heads of state but we can easily add to the list Vladimir Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Victor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits predicted that we were entering an age when democracy would be ascendant throughout the world. Thirty years later, we are witnessing democratic systems and values under full assault all over the globe.
3. Assault on truth: Tom Nichols’ 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, portrays how we have levelled the playing field in such a way that people with knowledge, degrees and credentials are dismissed as “out of touch” elites and anyone with access to a computer and a bit of social media savvy can build an audience for “alternate facts”, whether it is about climate change, vaccinations or who won an election. The New York Times review re-titled the book, “How Ignorance Became a Virtue”.  Credentialed news media gets labelled “fake news” and internet platforms like Facebook make money by developing algorithms that privilege posts that polarize and perpetuate conflict between groups. Donald Trump’s new social media outlet is called “Truth”, taking a page out of the Soviet playbook that called the State controlled newspaper, Pravda!
4. “Fixing” Elections: Some say that the January 6^th assault on the U.S. Capitol was an aberration and can never happen again. But not 24 hours after this country was a hairbreadth away from overturning the election of Joe Biden as the 46^th President of the United States, the bulk of the Republican party rallied around some “alternative facts” about what happened. Since then, in dozens of states, laws have been passed that will deny the vote to hundreds of thousands of, mostly, people of color that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. And in dozens of swing districts around the country, pro-Trump Republicans have taken over election commissions that are supposed to be non-partisan bodies used to guarantee free and fair elections.

What is the Jewish stake in all of these developments? I would suggest they include Jewish values, Jewish history and the Jewish future.

Jewish Values: It would be an overstatement to claim that democracy, as it developed in England (the Magna Carta), France (the French Revolution) and America (the American Revolution), originated with the Bible. And yet the intellectual and political leaders in all three countries were mostly people of faith who sourced many of the values informing democratic principles in the Bible. The protection of the stranger (ahavat ger), the rule of law (din and mishpat), the commitment to truth (emet one of the names of God) are all deeply rooted in Jewish sources.

Jewish history: I don’t like to overuse references to the Holocaust. Yet Timothy Snyder’s short masterpiece, On Tyranny, is now a “must read”. In the book, he draws numerous parallels between the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of Nazism and Facism in Europe in the 1930’s. He wrote the book after one year of Trump’s Presidency. Since then, the dozens of parallels he cited could be multiplied many times over. Every one of the four factors I cited above, were building blocks of Hitler’s Nazi Germany that ended with the murder of one-third of the Jewish people in the world.

The Jewish future: The Jewish love affair with America pre-dates Jewish economic success here. It was rooted in a recognition that America’s commitment to democracy and cultural pluralism was unprecedented in any other country on earth and, those two principles, were a guarantee that Jews could not only survive, but could thrive in this country even though our religious/cultural identity was not rooted here. That confidence, built over the course of more than three centuries, has eroded in the space of five years! Just in the last few months, in numerous social gatherings, the conversation has turned to: Where will you move to if Trump wins the Presidency in 2024?

***

Writing this message on January 6^th, the first anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to reverse the outcome of the election of Joe Biden as the President of the United States, I am thinking about one of Mordecai Kaplan’s least well-known books. In 1951 he published The Faith of America, a book that took all of the principles of American democracy, liberty and pluralism and re-cast them in a sacred key. He understood that cultural values needed a “container” if they would survive. Aware that Judaism provided that sacred container for Jews, allowing Jews to perpetuate a group identity during almost 2000 years without political sovereignty, Kaplan sought to do the same thing for American values. The book created a “religion” of American values.

Of course, Kaplan could not have forseen how much democracy stands, “at risk” in the first part of the 21^st century. But if Kaplan were alive today, I feel certain that he would propose that we create of January 6^th something akin to an American Tisha B’Av, commemorating a day when the most sacred building in America was attacked and desecrated by people who put blind loyalty to a demagogue above a commitment to the U.S. Constitution and the lawful transfer of power. He would have created a liturgy, songs and poems that would be read in churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, city halls and civic arenas all across the country. It would be a solemn day of learning and reflection to remind Americans, for years to come, what happens when we don’t safeguard the principles that have made America a beacon of democracy for people all over the world since its founding in 1776.

What a powerful day such a new American “holiday” would be! Maybe, we need to create such a commemoration ourselves.

Evidence the position taken this week by the DC chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a climate action advocacy group. Sunrise DC was signed on as one of the sponsors of tomorrow’s Freedom to Vote Relay-Rally in Washington. But in a statement on Tuesday, they declared that they could not participate in a rally with Zionist organizations. Their statement, read in part: “Given our commitment to racial justice, self-governance and indigenous sovereignty, we oppose Zionism and any state that enforces its ideology.”

Sunrise DC went on to name three national Jewish organizations which are co-sponsors of tomorrow’s important rally to protect the right to vote for all Americans all across the country: The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; The National Council of Jewish Women; and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Each of these organizations have worked for decades on issues of peace, justice and equal opportunity for all. All three are also strongly supportive of the State of Israel, although not uncritically.

It is not uncommon for individuals and organizations with widely divergent ideologies to overlook their differences in order to form an alliance to advance a very specific cause. As they say, ”politics makes for strange bedfellows”. Certainly, the recent attempts in a variety of states to make it more difficult for lower income people of color to vote is a cause around which, one would hope, many organizations might find common cause. It therefore shocks the senses that an organization whose primary mission is concern for the environment felt the need to withdraw its sponsorship of this Saturday’s march because several Jewish organizations have a pro-Israel agenda. Of course, progressive orthodoxy requires that the label ”Zionist” be used for a pro-Israel stance.

Oftentimes, in the world of politics, we turn a blind eye to morally problematic positions or behaviors of people and organizations when they are on “our side” of the issues. As Jews, we cannot sanction such a moral slippery slope. Intolerance and bigotry are wrong, whether expressed by the extremist right or the progressive left. And, sad to say, there is a lot of this dangerous thinking and action on both ends of today’s partisan political spectrum. Jews, who care about truth, must condemn it.

Sometimes, when I know the deceased well, I wonder why, in all of our previous interactions, I never learned about the many things that got revealed by the eulogies. I accept some of the blame for that. But I would also fault the widely accepted social convention that too much probing in a social situation is not polite. And then there is the converse problem, even more common. Being in a conversation where your counterpart does not ask you a single question about you at all.

We are left in a situation where we know a lot of people. We even call them “friends”. But we don’t know much at all about what is really important to them or what makes them tick. Sounds a lot like Facebook. But the problem preceded the launch of Facebook and exists independent of that platform.

There is a version of this problem within family systems that is a bit more complex. How well do those of us who are parents, succeed in conveying to our children who we are and what matters most to us? And conversely, how often do children ask their parents about these life questions, when they are teenagers; when they are young adults; or when they themselves become parents?

I was recently part of a memorial service for a Jewish communal professional who worked on a national level and who made enormous contributions to adult Jewish education and to a vibrant Jewish community. Several prominent rabbis spoke at this memorial service and offered a teaching in memory of the deceased. The final speaker was the son of the deceased. An articulate young man in his 20’s, the son said that his father was a great Dad. He had wonderful memories of going to ball games with him, family vacations and just hanging around the house. Then the son added: A lot of what I just heard about my father from the previous speakers was new to me. I really didn’t know what my Dad did when he left the house on Monday morning.  

I felt sad thinking of how much the son could have learned from his father had he shown an interest in the way that his father impacted the wider world. The accomplishments, the failures, the lessons his Dad learned in the course of his professional work. And I also felt bad for the now deceased father. How he would have loved to share more of what made him want to get out of bed in the morning, with his son.

This phenomenon is not unique. I have officiated at many funerals when the surviving children have regrets about not knowing more about the lives of their recently deceased mother or father. Often, death is the impetus for an adult child to want to learn more about the parent who has just passed away.

Judaism puts a high priority on our linkages to past generations. One of the most common phrases in the Bible is “Eleh toldot…” “these are the generations of…” The phrase sets up a story and it ties that story to a generational chain that may go back several generations. Those long lists of genealogies in the Bible are not just “filler”. They make the point that so much of what we do is built into our DNA based on who has raised us and the generational legacy that has been passed down to us. Even the form of our names in Hebrew, link us to previous generations. Hebrew has no surnames; my name is Shalom Hanoch ben Avraham and Yehudit. This connects me to my parents, Allan and Judy, and, by extension, to the generations that came before them.

But modern society has weakened the link between children and parents considerably. The emphasis on identity formation privileges the autonomous self. More and more parents feel that they should not impose their values on their children.  As children mature, they want to become masters of their own destiny. Many young adults, either consciously or sub-consciously, find that both geographic and emotional distance from their parents is necessary for them to fully mature and create a life that is not tied to the wishes of their parents. For parents, knowing how and when to “let go” may be the single most challenging part of parenting.

I recently became more attuned to how difficult navigating the parent-child bond is from the child’s point of view. This summer a friend of mine, Ethan Davidson, published a memoir about his relationship with his father. Ethan is the son of William Davidson., the one-time owner of the Detroit Pistons and a nationally prominent Jewish philanthropist who died in 2009. I got to know Ethan because the Davidson Foundation is one of the major funders of my national work with rabbis and Jewish social entrepreneurs. Ethan heads up the foundation’s grants committee. Ethan left Detroit as a young man and travelled the world. His primary professional pursuit was as a singer-songwriter and he supported himself by playing gigs all over the United States in bars and restaurants. During that time, he was pretty much estranged from his family.

This is an excerpt from the book:

“Through all my changes, all the different identities I took on, I was struggling to individuate, to get as far away from (my father) as possible. Nothing grows in the shade of a big tree…I tried on a lot of different faces; I was a lot of different people; (my father) wasn’t always comfortable (with the identities I was trying on), but, if I was playing in Detroit, he always came. Eventually, I had to tell him not to come anymore….I don’t think (my father) ever was able to understand the degree to which I really needed to individuate myself from him.”

Reading this, my heart was breaking. For both Ethan and for his father, who I did not know. But here is the remarkable thing. Not only did Ethan come back to Detroit in his early 30’s, he came back to all of the things that his father most deeply cared about. He became a very serious student of Judaism. He built a small bungalow behind his house where he retreats every shabbat with his three sons, Asher, William and Levi now ages13, 12 and 8. He spends each shabbat studying Jewish themed subjects with them, going on walks and observing shabbat. Ethan has taken over the family foundation with great seriousness of purpose. And the book he just published is a form of reconciliation with his, now deceased, father.

Such are the mysteries of life and of families. “Eleh toldot”; “this is the true, unsanitized story of generational transition”. Let’s remember that in the first case of individuation in Jewish history, Abraham decides to smash all of the idols in his father’s idol-making shop. It was Abraham’s way of saying: “This cannot be my path”.

I suspect that the reason funerals often trigger the beginnings of a grown son or daughter wanting to know more about their mother or their father is that there is no longer a need to individuate, to protect the space between parent and child. The parent is now gone. And ironically, what was once a need to separate, so as to establish one’s own identity, evolves into a desire to understand and pass on the values that the previous generation represented.

A few years ago, I had the chance to meet Marshall Duke, a professor of psychology at Emory University. His life work has been about exploring how we pass down family legacies. His 20-question, “Do you know?” questionnaire provide prompts that offer a simple way to start the practice of family story telling. Professor Duke’s most important finding over 25 years of research is that the more an individual knows about her or his family, the more resilient he or she becomes. Giving our children deep roots, is a pre-requisite to giving them the wings to be who they are meant to be.  

Every family has its own approach to how parents continue to exert influence over their children, even as they become adults. And every parent struggles with how to give their adult children enough room to make their own decisions. But I do believe that we all stand to benefit by putting this issue on the table for more open discussion between the generations.

Here are three ideas I’d like to offer you on this Kol Nidre:

1. Judaism has a tradition of Ethical Wills in which parents write down the values and aspirations that have been central to their lives and that they hope might be embraced by their children. There are several books on the subject that offer guidance on how to write an ethical will. If you do write an ethical will, you should not stash it in the safe deposit box with your other will. Find a way to share it with your grown children and set aside some time to talk about it.
2. Create a special time when you can tell family stories to one another. Maybe it is on Chanukah, or at the Passover table or at Thanksgiving. For many years, when our family came back home after Kol Nidre services, we sat in our living room with our children and pulled out letters that grandparents wrote to us and to them. We never got through the letters without crying. I don’t know how much of those letters my kids remember. But I know that they remember the sacred time we set aside for the transmission of generational memories. And they got the message that family stories matter.
3. Validate the path chosen by your children. Honor and respect their decisions, even if,–no–especially if, it would have not been the path that you would have chosen for them. Don’t just think it. Tell them. A little validation goes a long way. And it will make it safer and more likely that they will, in turn, reach back to you for generational wisdom that can be so important in their own life journey.

In Midrash Tanhuma, there is the following passage: “There are three names by which a person is called. One is the name that parents determine. One is the name that the public gives a person based on what they do in the world. And the third name, is the name one gives to him or her, self. The last one, is the most precious name.”

The midrash is teaching parents a lesson. Your work is never done but it changes over time. The “name” that you give to your child is precious but, in the end, your grown child writes his or her own name by the person they want to become.

Honor that third “name”. Respect the path that your adult children have chosen. And, for heaven’s sake, do everything in your power to keep the lines of communication open, even if it means eating some, undeserved, “humble pie”. Eleh toldot. This is how we pass a legacy on, m’dor l’dor, from one generation to the next.

Wishing you and your extended families, a shana tova umetukah.

To her great credit, Biles explained to the press that she has been battling with some mental health issues and a specific condition—the twisties—which rob gymnasts of their ability to control their aerial rotations. Given the heights and difficulties of the jumps at this level of the sport, Biles would risk serious injury if she competed. Within a matter of days, commentary on Biles’ decision went from critical to laudatory.
 
I work with many rabbis and Jewish communal professionals who are physically and mentally exhausted from their year-long₊ attempt to work in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Many eagerly looked forward to a summer break. Now these professionals return, only to find a Delta resurgence of the virus.
 
Of course, Covid is an extraordinary event. Nobody could have predicted it. But America’s addiction to work is a well-documented phenomenon. Studies show that Americans work more hours than any other nation in the world. We are the only industrialized country that does not have a law requiring a minimum amount of annual leave. And Americans take less vacation time than any other industrialized country in the world.
 
To state the obvious—this is not healthy. Judaism introduced to the world the idea of shabbat, a day of rest that mandates that we abstain from work and all commerce so as to learn the value of nature, friendships, conversation, reading, community and much more. Next month we usher in a shmita year, a year when the Bible tells us that even the land must rest and not be planted. Both concepts embody the notion of a healthy work/life balance.
 
In recent years, we’ve seen the start of some long overdue conversations in Jewish communal organizations about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as well as the hostile work environment that women often face and which has not been adequately addressed. Let’s add to the list the unrealistic expectations set by Jewish organizations on their employees, from the executive suite to the maintenance staff. Employees who are able to spend time with their families, pursue leisure time activities, volunteer with civic organizations, spend time in nature, read a book, etc. are happier and more fulfilled people. Their productivity in the workplace will be far greater than if they regularly work until 10pm or get in the habit of working through an entire weekend just to finish off a given work project.  
 
We pay lip service to the idea that every person is to be respected as an image of the Divine. It is time that we put that principle into practice.

Aleph: Wilderness seems to be an apt metaphor to describe this past year of Covid-19 lockdowns and retreat from life as we once knew it. Often, we get a better perspective on an experience only when it is in our rearview mirror. This past week, I had my first, in-person gathering with a small group of people who are not family members. It felt a bit illicit, but wonderful. This weekend restaurants are opening back up at full capacity in Montgomery County. And starting next shabbat, we’ll have regular services at Adat Shalom for up to 110 people, while others can participate through Zoom. We are indeed emerging from a wilderness.

So, what have we learned? I went back yesterday to a British video that made its way around the world back when the pandemic first started. It was called the Great Realization. It shows a fable being read to a small child as he is put to bed by his older brother. Some of you may recall seeing the video when we had no idea whether the lockdown would last a month, a year or longer. The tale is read to the child decades into the future and it reflects on all that the world learned from the 2020 pandemic. It casts the pandemic as a consequence of all the ways that human civilization messed up in the first two decades of the 21^st century. Environmental degradation; callousness to the poor and vulnerable; obsession with materialism; and addiction to mobile phones at the expense of human relationships. The “happy ending” of the fable is that, coming out of the pandemic wilderness, the world pivoted to a more human-centered, ecologically conscious, compassionate world. It should only happen to us!

It turns out that the wilderness/the pandemic became a moment of a great revelation. It is worth each of us taking stock of what we learned this past year. As difficult as it was, the radical change in routine was clearly a learning opportunity. It is important that we take some time to harvest that wisdom as it might change the way we live our lives going forward. Revelations, after all, come infrequently. They should change us.

Bet: Speaking of revelation, tomorrow night we celebrate the festival of Shavuot, the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Many Reconstructionists get hung up on whether or not the Torah was actually given by God to Moses as recorded in Exodus 19. That misses the point. Some of the biggest Truths in life, never actually happened. They were “realized”. And so it was, so it is, with the concept of revealed Torah.

Regardless of how observant you are (or are not), the “big reveal” of Torah is not the particulars of the 613 mitzvot, it is rather the notion that an ethically-driven, morally based society depends on people accepting that they need to surrender some autonomy for the common good. A society obsessed by individualism, untempered by a commitment to the common good will, ultimately, unravel. We have seen that, big time, during the pandemic. The people who refused to put on masks; who did not refrain from being in large gatherings; who called for the firing of public health officials for doing their jobs. And because of their selfishness, because of their refusal to surrender some of their autonomy for the common good, thousands died.

There was a piece in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago by an Israeli named Orly Halpern. She talked about how Israeli society accepted intrusions on their liberty for the sake of the common good. Centralized health records were shared with Pfizer in a deal cut early in the pandemic that assured that Israel would get a fast and plentiful supply of vaccine in return for data Pfizer wanted in order to study the vaccine’s effectiveness. Israelis respected the lockdown necessary to curtail the spread of the virus. Israelis were even OK with the national security services tracking every Israeli through their mobile phones in order to help with contact tracing. None of this could have happened in America. Israelis have learned that to survive, they need to accept limits on their rights and accept obligations that insure the survival of the state. It is called brit, covenant. In English, mutual obligation.  This is one of the key lessons of Shavuot and of Torah and perhaps, it is one of the gifts that Judaism can offer the world—how we need to surrender some of our autonomy in order to protect and preserve the common good.   

Gimmel: Throughout history, people withdrew from society and sought out the wilderness to find themselves, to hear some call or vocation and to discover their destiny. A sojourn in a wilderness was a common element to the life stories of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and countless others who brought wisdom into the world. The Morrocan-Israeli singer/songwriter, Shlomo Bar, has a song called Hamidbar Medaber, The Desert Speaks. What is so clever about the title of the song is that each Hebrew word has the same letters. Without vowels, they look identical. But this is more than a word play. The song title suggests that only in the quiet of the desert can we hear our inner voice, which may well be what our ancestors called, the voice of God.

The rabbis taught that the reason the Torah was given in the wilderness is so that no one could claim that Torah, Eternal Truth, belongs to any one people or any one place. Tour books notwithstanding, we don’t even really know where Mt. Sinai is. And that is as it should be. We don’t need to create a Temple in the place where Torah was given. We don’t need to plant a national flag. Torah is universal. It is without time and without place. It happens when we empty ourselves of all of our assumptions and open ourselves up to the universe and the universal Truths that the universe holds for us.

Even as I speak, the Holy Land of Israel is desecrating all notions of holiness. This is what happens when small-minded people and small-minded leaders make decisions and take actions that violate the deep wisdom of the Hebrew prophets. It is what happens when the children of Abraham forget the reason why Torah was given in the wilderness, not tied to any political entities.

Let us pray that we, that the world, can re-discover the holiness of the midbar, of the wilderness, and that in that wild but quiet place, we can find a Mt. Sinai that will teach us how to live more compassionately with one another and in harmony with our planet.