Soviet Jewry

Spiritual Heroes: A Kol Nidre Sermon

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For many years, the organization that I led-PANIM- ran 4-day seminars on Jewish values and social activism for teens who came to Washington D.C. from around the country. When I would speak to the students, my lead-off question would be: Who are your spiritual heroes?

It was a question that gave pause. Most American teens would have fairly quick answers if I asked them to name their favorite lead singer in a band. Or their favorite movie star. Or their go-to sports legend. Each of those answers could have come back affixed with the label “hero”. But “spiritual hero” was not a word combination that they expected. I’d wait a minute or two and usually a few hands would go up in the air. Before I called on them I offered a definition so as to make it possible for more students to get a person in their mind’s eye.

My definition: “A spiritual hero is someone, either living or deceased who, by virtue of their words and/or deeds, led a life that inspired others and was worthy of emulation.”

Let me take a moment now and ask you to think of one person who has served for you as a spiritual hero. I hope most of you have thought of someone. If not, don’t worry. This sermon might give you some ideas. Tomorrow, during the afternoon break discussion, we will have a chance to share thoughts with one another.

One of the reasons I decided to speak about spiritual heroes this year is because we live in a time when we desperately need to restore our faith in the nobility of the human spirit. I assume most of you shared my dismay at the unexpected rise of Donald Trump as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I dare say that we could describe the man’s character by simply picking out 5-10 of the lines from the al chet prayer—a list of behaviors that we need to repent for. Let’s see: triviality of thought; shaming of one’s neighbor; arrogance, excessive pride; abusive speech, to name just a few. OK, maybe it is more than 10. Suffice it to say: Hardly a role model for a national leader.

Some would say that we should not look to the political realm for moral or spiritual leadership. They will say that what it takes to rise to the top requires too many compromises, too many concessions, too much deal making. I vehemently disagree.

Most of us have lived to see a handful of political leaders emerge as spiritual heroes: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Lech Walesa in Poland. Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Aung San Su Ky (Chi) in Burma. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in Israel.

None of these leaders were saints. None lived unblemished lives. But each one was able to rise above the small-mindedness that is the currency of electoral politics to seize an historic moment for their respective countries. Each was able to act in a way that helped to bend the arc of history toward justice. By doing that, they made the world better; they were role models for their citizens; and they helped us understand what it takes to act with spiritual heroism.

Spiritual heroes represent more than simply “doing the right thing”. For that I could have used the term “moral hero”. Children can be taught to do the right thing. But spiritual heroism implies a much more mature understanding that our behavior has cosmic significance. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, taught that the universe was structured to support human goodness. It was how he understood the concept of God. Spiritual heroism requires cultivating an inner sense of what is right and just. Morality requires our head to guide our behavior. Spiritual heroism requires head, heart and the totality of our selves—our souls (i.e. the meaning of the first line of the V’ahavta prayer).

Allow me to expand on the concept of spiritual heroism by offering a glimpse of two people who have been spiritual heroes for me. Both passed away this past year so it is fitting to invoke their legacies: Elie Wiesel and Rev. John Steinbruck.

Elie Wiesel died this summer at the age of 87. He first came to public attention as a chronicler of the Holocaust. After his mother and sister were killed at Auschwitz, Wiesel and his father were deported to Buchenwald. His father died within the year but Elie Wiesel survived. His book, Night, is his recounting of his experience in the concentration camp and it is the way that millions of Jews and non-Jews learned about the Holocaust.

But for me, the book that made a far greater impression was his book The Jews of Silence. It was published in 1966, six years after Night. I was 14 years old. The book was my wake up call to social conscience and it started me on a 20-year journey as an activist on behalf of some 3 million Jews in the Soviet Union. I was transformed by the poetic way that Wiesel flipped the meaning of the word “silence” in the book’s title. Much of the book was about the how the Communist State silenced Soviet Jews and restricted their ability to practice Judaism or to emigrate. But the book’s punch came from Wiesel’s accusation that Western Jews were as responsible for that predicament as were Soviet officials. It was our silence, it was our apathy that allowed Soviet Jews to be imprisoned in a totalitarian state. This, he argued, was morally indefensible. As the British philosopher, Edmund Burke said in the 19th century, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (good people) to do nothing.”

I pledged to myself not to become a “Jew of silence”, someone whose apathy made me complicit in the suffering of other people.

In the ensuing years I made two trips to Russia to meet with Soviet Jews and bring them Jewish “contraband”. I attended dozens of rallies and spoke at dozens of synagogues, showing my slides of my visits with Soviet refuseniks. My first congregation adopted refusenik Lev Elbert, who lived in Kiev. While he was serving a prison sentence for trumped up drug charges in 1983, we helped to facilitate a Bar-Mitzvah for his son, Karmi, via telephone. I later met Lev and his son in Israel. This type of activism was widely practiced by thousands of Jews in the West during those years. These Jews emerged from their “silence” to mobilize on behalf of our oppressed sisters and brothers trapped in the Soviet state.

Ironically, my first face to face meeting with Elie Wiesel took place on December 6, 1987. I was then the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington D.C. and we helped to organize the Freedom Rally for Soviet Jewry the day before Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan for a summit meeting in the White House.

Wiesel and I met on the podium of the rally. The rally would not have happened but for the efforts of Wiesel and recently released prisoner of conscience, Natan Sharansky. Few gave the rally much chance for success in the middle of the winter. But the rally captured the imagination of Jews across the country and it did not take long for Jewish organizations to sign on and support it. A quarter million Jews attended the rally and it changed the course of history. Within a year, the gates of emigration opened and close to a million Soviet Jews went to Israel and to Western countries. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own tyranny. Textbooks and courses on human rights will now cite the Soviet Jewry movement as the first successful international grassroots effort in history to reverse a national policy of discrimination. The campaign started with Wiesel’s book, The Jews of Silence.

Among the many things that I found so inspiring about Elie Wiesel is that he did not restrict his activism to Jewish causes. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, not because he wrote the book Night, not because he was a voice for the victims of the Shoah and not because of his advocacy for Soviet Jewry. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he stated that, as a Jew, he was part of a traumatized generation that experienced the silence and abandonment of the world while Jews were systematically exterminated. Yet he went on to say that he could not restrict his own activism to Jewish victimization alone. Among the issues he invoked in his Nobel speech were: apartheid; the rights of Palestinians; hunger; racism; and the political persecution of writers, poets and intellectuals throughout the world.

Some 2000 years after Rabbi Hillel stated: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what do I amount to?” Wiesel re-stated the same principle in a modern idiom. Indeed, in April of 1993, I was present at the dedication of the US Holocaust Museum. More than a dozen heads of state were present as was President Bill Clinton who offered the keynote remarks. Wiesel, who at the time was chairman the US Holocaust Commission, followed President Clinton. In his trademark soft voice, he turned to the President and said: “Mr. President: If your words here today mean anything, then you cannot stand silent as Bosnians are being starved and slaughtered in the Balkans.” Within the year, the Clinton Administration became actively engaged in protecting Bosnia until the Dayton Accords were signed, bringing an end to that horrific war.

The words and actions of one spiritual hero named Elie Wiesel literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Reverend John Steinbruck did not play on as large an international stage as did Elie Wiesel but his spiritual heroism was no less impactful. In fact, because John and I were friends, he may have had more impact on me than did Wiesel.

When I moved to Washington D.C. in 1984 to head up the Jewish Community (Relations) Council, John was already a legend in a city that can get easily jaded to celebrity. John came to Washington in 1970 to be the senior pastor of Luther Place Church. The church was at the corner of 14th and N Streets, off of Logan Circle, an area that a couple of years earlier had burned in the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luther Place had a beautiful, historic building but its membership had made the exodus from the decaying inner city and its future looked dim.

I first met John standing on 16th Street across from the Soviet Embassy. The Community Council that I headed was the sponsor of this demonstration of solidarity for Soviet Jews. Every day at 12:30pm, a different Jewish organization took responsibility for standing silently across from the Embassy for 15 minutes holding signs that said “Free Soviet Jews”. The vigil took place without interruption for 21 years, from 1970-1991. John was a great champion of human rights and that commitment led him to take a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 to meet with Jews. He came back deeply committed to the cause and on many Jewish holidays John, along with a handful of his Christian congregants were the ones who stood vigil across from the Embassy while the Jewish community observed its holiday.

But Soviet Jewry was only one of John’s many crusades. Aware that within blocks of his church dozens of people slept on the streets of the Nation’s Capital, John challenged the churches and synagogues of the area to practice “Biblical Hospitality” by taking the homeless into their buildings overnight. The idea made for a great sermon but no clergyperson in town had the courage and the determination to walk the talk. How would a congregation support such an effort? What would it cost? How would security issues be handled? How could budgets accommodate the exorbitant insurance premiums that would result?

John taught by example. Because of the membership decline in his congregation, his Sunday School classrooms were not being used. “Let’s open the doors” he told his Board. “Invite the homeless in from the cold and let us make our church into a sanctuary of hospitality”. His Board raised all of the expected objections at which point John said: “This is a church and we don’t put God to a vote”. The sheer force of his moral argument carried the day and within weeks, homeless people were invited to come in off the street to get a hot meal and bed down in Luther Place’s classrooms.

Very few congregations followed John’s lead in bringing the homeless into their buildings but they were inspired to support his efforts through financial contributions and a legion of volunteers (including from Adat Shalom).

John built a compassion-industrial complex, an array of institutions all growing out of his simple but profound commitment to help the most vulnerable among us. At his urging, Luther Place bought the townhouses across the street from his church which became a continuum of care facility for homeless women. He then raised millions of dollars to build a state of the art residential complex for women called N Street Village. The homeless needed medical care so the Zacchaeus Free Clinic was founded where physicians volunteered their time to provide free care to the city’s homeless. To address the chronic food insecurity of the city’s poor, John inspired the founding of Bread for the City whose van, dubbed “the glean machine”, picked up leftover food from events all over the city and turned that food into meals for the poor.

It is breathtaking to realize the power of one person’s ministry to change the life of so many—from homeless people who got a new lease on life because they were nurtured by the institutions created by John to middle class people of faith who came to realize that religion can and should be about much more than just worship and ritual. It would be hard to find a better example of a spiritual hero than Rev. John Steinbruck.

Let me then come back to the question I posed to you at the opening of this sermon. “Who would you identify as a spiritual hero?” someone, either living or deceased who, by virtue of their words and/or deeds, led a life that inspired others and was worthy of emulation.

At the root of spiritual heroism is the belief that every person, regardless of race, religion, nationality or political ideology, is made in the Divine Image and is deserving of respect. The fact that we live in a world in which 65 million people are now refugees is a reminder of how few spiritual heroes are among us. The fact that we live in the wealthiest country in the world—the US– in which close to a quarter of all children live in poverty is a reminder of how few spiritual heroes are among us. Read the book, The New Jim Crow, as you must, and you get a harsh reminder of how deeply racism is embedded in American society, condemning people of color to be a perpetual underclass in our society. All these are reminders of how few in number are the spiritual heroes among us.

Identifying a spiritual hero for yourself is a valuable exercise. I encourage you to do it. But I am even more interested in each of you seeing yourselves as spiritual heroes. The entire High Holyday liturgy is about making you into a spiritual hero. You have a few flaws? Welcome to the club. You made a few mistakes? You’ve got company there too.

But each of you have engaged in acts of love. Each of you have offered words of kindness. Each of you have stood up for those who are vulnerable. Each of you have given time and/or money to causes that will make the world a better place. These are behaviors that are worthy of emulation. This is the stuff of spiritual heroism.

There is a Chinese proverb that says: “Don’t curse the darkness; light a candle.” It parallels a verse in the book of Job: v’al drachecha naga or, act in such a way that a divine light will shine on you. Or a better translation: act with integrity, act with compassion, act with moral courage and a light will shine from within you. This is the essence of spiritual heroism. You can be source of divine light for others. Many of you are among that army of spiritual heroes who either in your professional roles, in your volunteer roles or in your family systems, are finding ways not just to curse the darkness but to bring forth light.

Perhaps it is time for a modest reconstruction of the theme of the High Holydays. Much of the liturgy we recite cites all of the ways that we may have fallen short or sinned. But how about this amendment to the High Holyday practice? Think of it as High Holydays, 2.0.

Let us identify one quality, one action that we engaged in, even once this year, that gave off light in a dark place. Make that action the topic of conversation with your spouse, your children, your friends and let that action inspire others to do the same. This is not bragging; it is modeling. It is so necessary. And we must do it. The world we live in today is filled with quite enough darkness; it is time to generate a bit more light.

May the New Year help you see the spiritual hero in the mirror. And when you see that reflection, may you know that this is the light that you were destined to bring into the world.

Note: This sermon was delivered at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) on Oct. 11, 2016.

Elie Wiesel: The Echo Chamber of Moral Witness

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Although I had the privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel speak at least a dozen times and had the opportunity to once have a private meeting with him in conjunction with a book that I was writing, my thoughts about him actually relate to how much impact he had on those who never met the man.

I read The Jews of Silence soon after it was published in 1966. I was 14. No other book had as much impact on my life. It was my wake up call to social conscience. I was transformed by the poetic way that Wiesel flipped the image of Soviet Jews, whose impulse to connect to Jewish practice and Jewish people was silenced by the Communist State, to the image of Western Jews whose silence was a function of moral indifference.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on July 14, 2016.

In the ensuing years I made several trips to Russia to meet and bring Jewish “contraband” to Soviet Jews. I also had a supply of name bracelets with the names of select prisoners of conscience. I attended dozens of rallies and spoke at dozens of synagogues, showing my slides of my visits with Soviet refuseniks. My first congregation adopted refusenik Lev Elbert, who lived in Kiev. While he was serving a prison sentence for trumped up drug charges in 1983, we helped to facilitate a Bar-Mitzvah for his son, Karmi, via telephone. This type of activism was not atypical for thousands of Jews in the West during those years, Jews who emerged from their “silence” to mobilize the single most successful grassroots human rights campaign of the 20th century.

Ironically, my first face to face meeting with Elie Wiesel took place on December 6, 1987. I was then the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington D.C. and we helped to organize the Freedom Sunday for Soviet Jewry the day before Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan for a summit meeting.

Wiesel and I met on the podium of the rally. The rally would not have happened but for the efforts of Wiesel and recently released prisoner of conscience, Natan Sharansky. The rally was not exactly the “style” of the Jewish establishment, which preferred to do their advocacy behind closed doors. But the rally captured the imagination of Jews across the country and it did not take long for Jewish organizations to sign on and support it. A quarter million Jews and non-Jews attended the rally and it changed the course of history. Within a year, the gates of emigration opened and close to a million Soviet Jews went to Israel and to Western countries. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weigh of its own tyranny.

A month after that historic rally, I left my position to found PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. It was a national organization designed to use the moral teachings of Judaism to inspire greater social and political activism on the part of young American Jews. For more than 20 years, almost any Jewish institution that worked with teenagers would send them to our 4-day Panim el Panim seminars in Washington D.C. throughout the school year. During the summers we ran longer, more intensive programs.

By rough estimate, during those years, I gave over 200 keynote presentations to over 10,000 Jewish teens participating in PANIM programs. The life and wisdom of Elie Wiesel was a centerpiece of those presentations.

First I would relate my own moral “wake-up call” and tell how I became involved in the struggle to save Soviet Jewry. Second I would ask how many knew of Elie Wiesel and then, ask why he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Since most teens at least knew of, if not read, Night, most were surprised to learn that Wiesel’s Peace Prize came not because he became a voice for the victims of the Holocaust—and that he was for sure—but because he turned from championing the memory of Jewish suffering during the Shoah to a more broadly framed commitment to stand witness to the dangers of intolerance, persecution and genocide wherever in the world it occurred.

Wiesel’s Nobel acceptance speech is a beautiful re-statement of Hillel’s famous maxim: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what am I?” Wiesel never turned his back on his Jewish commitments. But he did realize that such solidarity with one’s own is not sufficient in a world so filled with violence, hatred and oppression.

My third point would be considered controversial in many Jewish spaces but, here again, I quoted from a speech that I once heard Wiesel deliver. Wiesel stated two lessons that he learned from the Shoah. One was that we must be forever vigilant against those who might seek to persecute Jews or threaten the State of Israel. Jews have enemies in the world and, after the Shoah, it would be naïve to ignore those ongoing threats. But, he hastened to add, the second lesson he took from the Shoah is that Jews cannot make “defense” the totality of their public agenda. We are a people with a sacred mission to bring healing to a broken world. We must therefore ally with the most vulnerable people in the world, regardless of their race, religion or creed.

I would inevitably build on these lessons from Wiesel to challenge our students and ask rhetorically: What will be you wake-up call? What are you destined to do? How will you use your education, your political access, your privilege to ally with those who don’t have your good fortune, be they Jewish or not?

Hundreds, if not thousands of Jewish young people took that message to heart and are doing the sacred work of tzedek all over the planet. Thousands more were exposed to Wiesel’s teachings in other contexts, reading his books, attending his lectures, being taught by those, who like me, were simply echo chambers of his profound moral witness to the world.

May we be worthy of the example of his life.

Welcome to the Tribe

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Kol Nidre, 2012:

Some years ago the Jewish Week asked me to write an op-ed before the High Holydays. At the risk of being thrown out of the rabbi’s union I said that I wasn’t quite sure how many of the Jews showing up for Rosh haShana and Yom Kippur were there for the prayers or, for that matter, to wrestle with the themes of forgiveness and repentance. Rather, they were there to hang out with other Jews. Well before the internet was invented, Jews created the original flash mob. “Pass the word. Rosh haShana and Yom Kippur are coming. Everyone will be there. Show up.” And we do.

There is something nice, comforting, even exciting about being with other people that you know and even many that you don’t know who share a common history, religion and ethnic folkways. Mordecai Kaplan hit the nail on the head when he called it “peoplehood.” In many ways, peoplehood is another term for tribalism. For me, there are no negative connotations to the term “tribalism”.  It does not require drums, feathers or body paint (although Adat Shalom is really big on drums). Tribalism is simply an extended family, and it carries all the charm and dysfunction of family as well. The tribal instinct of Jews is strong due to historic conditioning; in so many places over so many centuries, Jews were the oppressed minority. There was no one we could count on except each other.

There are, however, two problems with tribal Judaism. First is that we are becoming increasingly aware that tribal identity can be morally corrosive. It is too easy to get into our tribal cocoon and see everything exclusively from our own, limited perspective. Jews are certainly prone to the syndrome. There are many Jews who evaluate every matter of public policy based on whether or not it is “good for the Jews”. In Israel, the tribal path is the one that makes Palestinians invisible. Too many Jews in Israel and in the diaspora choose to ignore the abuses of Palestinian rights that take place in the territories every day and the discrimination facing the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs. Sometimes our tribal tendencies make us so obsessed with our own history of persecution and ongoing threats to Jewish survival that we cannot see how we might be complicit in the oppression of others.

There is also a second problem with tribal Judaism. Our children, next generation Jews, the Jews who are Millenials, are increasingly post-tribal. I call their identity “covenantal”. Covenantal Jewish identity is strongly rooted in universalist tendencies. Covenantal Jews have some awareness that Judaism brought many core values into the world like compassion, charity, human dignity and care for the natural world. They might even take pride in that fact. Yet they will see those values best realized in service to humanity at large. Because their primary identity is as global citizens, and their Jewish identity is secondary at best, covenantal Jews resist the bias of previous generations to preference Jewish loyalties. That bias relates to friendships, organizational affiliations, relationship to the state of Israel and even the choice of spouse. In fact, the suggestion to a covenantal Jew that they should only consider marrying other Jews sounds ethically offensive because they see it as violating a key Jewish value about treating all human beings equally.

As with all attempts at categorizing attitudes and behaviors, my tribal and covenantal categories are stereotypes. Many here will identify with some parts of each. The case I want to make is simple. The Jewish community we have today was created by tribal Jews for tribal Jews. To the extent that the next generation of Jews is more heavily covenantal than it is tribal, the Jewish community cannot conduct business as usual and expect that the Jewish community will still be around in 100 years. We are already seeing dramatic declines in all of the tribal indicators of a strong Jewish community including synagogue affiliation, participation in communal Jewish federation campaigns, support for the state of Israel and in-marriage.

So here is the challenge: Can we transmit a tribal Jewish story in a way that next generation, covenantal Jews can hear it?

This evening, I want to articulate the shape of this new narrative.  I’ve got two objectives. First, there are a fair number of covenantal Jews here tonight whose future commitment to their Jewish identity and that of their children is up for grabs. I am hopeful that what I say and how I say it might make them open to Jewish identity in a way that they may not have been before. Second, for those whose Jewish identity is stronger, I hope you will take on some missionary work. Not in the Mitt Romney/Mormon fashion; I don’t want you to go door to door either in your neighborhood, or God-forbid in a developing country across the globe. Yet you interact daily with family members, friends and colleagues who don’t totally “get” why you identify as strongly as you do with your Jewish heritage and with the Jewish community. I want to provide you with some language that will help you because I think that our Jewish identity should be a great source of pride that we are willing to share with others.

Let me start with a story. Last December, I led a group of 18 members of Adat Shalom on a trip to Haiti. Organized by Pamela Sommers and Wendy Swire, the group was evenly divided between adults and their children, ages 15 to 30. We stayed in Leogane, near the center of the earthquake that devastated the country two years ago, and close to the New Christian School of Pastor Johnny Felix which Adat Shalom is supporting financially. During the days we worked side by side with Haitians helping to build houses that would enable them and their families to move from one room wood huts with no plumbing to these new homes. In the evenings, after our physical labor was done, we explored the teachings of Judaism to understand how our work was a fulfillment of Judaism’s core commandments about tzedek u’mishpat, doing righteousness and justice in the world without regard to race, religion or nationality.

It was clear to me that the adults were more taken by the study of Jewish sources than the young people. Though respectful, my sense was that to the teens, the Jewish study was some nice window dressing offered by their rabbi to fill the evenings. To paraphrase the title of a sermon I gave from this bimah a few years ago: “What’s Judaism got to do with it?” The important work was happening during the day.

Then on Sunday we went to Pastor Johnny’s church. It became abundantly clear in that setting that our being Jewish mattered a great deal.

The church was in a tent with a dirt floor. The benches people sat on were cast offs. Some were broken. It was clear how poor these Haitian were. Most did not even have permanent homes. Yet they were dressed exquisitely and had been there already for two hours when we arrived for the last 90 minutes of the service. As we walked in we were greeted by a Hebrew song that I taught a year earlier when I first visited the congregation–Shabbat shalom.  Our visit fell during the festival of Chanukah. Pastor Johnny had invited me to preach the morning sermon so I chose to use the lessons of Chanukah to offer words of hope and encouragement to people that had endured not just the devastation of a natural disaster but whose families had endured decades of brutality, oppression and corrupt rule by a string of dictators. And when our makeshift Adat Shalom choir got up to teach some Hebrew songs, the congregation joined with passion to the words: Hine mah tov umah naim, shevet achim gam yachad, “how good and beautiful it is to be in this space, one tribe of sisters and brothers sitting together in the spirit of friendship and in unity.”

These Haitians were devout Christians who live on next to nothing. Most had not finished high school. Sunday worship was the highlight of their week and no one would dream of missing it. They were simple people but beautiful souls. They had never read Mordecai Kaplan. To them we were God’s chosen people who had come to worship with them, to support their pastor and to provide financial support to the school Pastor Johnny built to educate their children. To them we were the children of Israel doing God’s work in the world just as had been written in the Bible.  The fact that we were Jewish mattered and everyone of us in the Adat Shalom delegation walked out of that church tent knowing it.

The work we did was not benefiting Jews; we were engaged in helping poor Haitians whose predicament got worse as a result of an earthquake. But Judaism framed our entire experience. It helped us explore the meaning of faith and suffering. It offered us the wisdom passed down through the centuries about our obligations to the poor. And to the Haitians who had never met a Jew before, we were the children of Israel, behaving in accordance with the word of God as written in the Bible. We were engaged in covenantal work but it took on much greater meaning when understood and presented in the context of our tribal identity.

Which brings me back to the changing nature of Jewish identity in America. How do we fulfill the commandment from the Sh’ma: v’shinantem l’vanecha, “you shall teach it diligently to your children?” How do we convey that Judaism is not some relic of religious practices and superstitions handed down from the past but rather a way of being in the world that allows us to live a life that honors our particular history and urges us to make the world better for all of humanity?

I believe that being a member of the tribe that we call the Jewish people helps us to live lives of sacred purpose. I offered a glimpse of what that looks like by bringing you with me into Pastor Johnny’s church on Sunday morning. But too many Jews, disgusted by the excesses of tribal identity, come to the conclusion that they are better off, the world is better off, if they abandon their religious/cultural/ethnic identity. They are wrong.

It is not a coincidence that Jews have been in the leadership of movements for positive social change for more than a century in numbers totally disproportionate to our percentage of the population. I could cite the labor movement, the civil rights movements, the anti-apartheid movement, international human rights and a dozen more such causes. Even fairly assimilated Jews are powerfully motivated by the Jewish tribal story because it contains universal, covenantal lessons. We are a people who were born in slavery and transitioned to freedom. We are a people who are reminded again and again in our liturgy and sacred texts, “oppress not the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. We are a people that has been history’s perpetual minority so we have worked to make the most radical teaching of Torah become part of a global ethic of human rights–that every human being has within them the spark of the Divine and must be treated with respect and dignity.

And you, my friends, by virtue of being part of the tribe called “the Jewish people” are potential carriers of that sacred covenantal message to a world that desperately needs it. I know many of you. And I know how many awesome good things you are already doing in the world. Yet I fear that there are still too many Jews who rejoice in their Jewish tribalism without thinking about the sacred purpose behind the tribe. And I also fear that too many Jews do the covenantal work but don’t value the tribe that is necessary to carry the message forward.

So much of the program here at Adat Shalom is designed to balance those twin commitments. Whether it is showing up the third Tuesday of every month when Adat Shalom staffs the Manna Food Center in Rockville; participating in Sukkot in April in conjunction with Yachad, to rehabilitate the home of a poor resident in our community; or perhaps signing up for Adat Shalom’s second annual service mission to Haiti Dec. 22nd-30th. I could give you a dozen other examples, but you get the point. The way Jews “walk the talk” of prophetic Judaism is by practice, practice, practice. I urge you in the year ahead to consider increasing your commitment to engage in just such kind of holy practice.

When we make “lives of sacred purpose” the central core of our Jewish identity, it is much easier to appreciate and celebrate the tribal aspects of our identity. I remember bumming around Europe as a college student with my best friend. In every city, we made a bee line to the synagogue or Jewish community center where we never failed to find a free meal, a warm bed and stories that gave me a new appreciation of the tenacity of Jewish survival and the mutual support from one Jew to the next that made that survival possible. Thirty years later Sandy and I were in Madrid during Passover. After we finished touring the Prado Museum we sat outside to eat lunch with the matzah and tuna fish that we had brought with us. A college student walked by and exclaimed: Matzah! She was a Jewish exchange student studying in Spain for the semester and had not made a single Jewish connection in all her time there, not even for Seder. But seeing matzah, all of her tribal bells starting ringing and she was elated. Of course, we invited her to share our matzah. We did not stay in touch, but I’d like to think that that little matzah moment helped connect this college student to her Jewish identity. Welcome to the tribe!

Some of you know that for more than 20 years, one of my central passions was the Soviet Jewry movement. I can think of no better example in my lifetime of how tribal ties between Jews was leveraged to achieve a greater good. In fact, the Soviet Jewry movement effected a change in the course of the history of the world. I was therefore deeply touched when just this past shabbat, David Silberman relayed a story initially told by Shlomo Carlebach during his session at shabbat breirot. It takes place in a Russian Gulag prison during the dark days of Communism. A Jew is serving a life sentence for his activism to emigrate to Israel, a crime under the Soviets. He hears that another Jew was just brought to the prison and he is committed to seek him out. During their one hour of exercise in the yard, he sees the new inmate, and falls into step beside him.

“Shalom Aleichem landsman”, he says in a whisper.

The new inmate glares at him. “Are you crazy? You will get us shot.”

“Do you know what tonight is?” asks the first Jew. “It is the start of Yom Kippur.”

“Big deal. We are Jews. So what? What has it gotten us?”

“I’ve been in this prison for ten years. You are the first Jew I have seen in all of this time. We must share this night together in some way. Let’s sing Kol Nidre together. Do you remember the melody?”

Tears filled the new inmate’s eyes. He whispered: “I used to sing Kol Nidre with my father in synagogue as a young boy. I haven’t heard it since then.”

So the two of them begin to chant the Kol Nidre melody together very softly. Suddenly they see the guards in the watchtower pointing their guns at them. The captain climbs down from the tower, walks in their direction with gun drawn. “What are you two Jews doing?” he demands.

“We are just singing a song.”

“Let me hear it again” said the captain. The two Jews are certain that this will be their final act before they are shot. The captain listens for a couple of minutes, allowing the prisoners to sing the melody through.

And then the captain said: “I was taken away from my family at age 14 and put into the Tsars army. I have been in the army my entire adult life. But your melody brought back memories that I had long forgotten–going to synagogue with my father, huddling under his talis as the cantor sang the Hebrew prayers. Now I realize that I was born a Jew even though it has been decades since I had anything to do with my people. I cannot help you out of this prison, but thank you for helping me remember who I am.”

Welcome to the tribe indeed.

Each of us asks ourselves. “Who am I? What parts of my identity are most meaningful? What is the legacy that I want to pass on to the next generation? For me, there is no part of my identity that confers more meaning than being part of the Jewish people. Not just the tribal part of the Jewish people but, as well, the piece of the Jewish story that compels me to ask myself every day whether I am worthy of my ancestors who stood at Sinai to receive the covenant of Torah.

At this time of the year we are painfully aware of our own mortality. Part of the beauty of connecting our personal life journey to the Jewish tribal story is that we know that the work of healing a broken world neither started with us, nor will the work end with us. To the extent that our values are important to us we hope that they will be carried on by our children, our grandchildren and generations well into the future. If we are successful perhaps our sacred tribal legacy might just bring the world a tad closer to redemption.