Increasing Our Holiness by Increasing the Light

The academies of Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel, two great Jewish authorities of the First century BCE, were once engaged in a debate about how to light the Hanukkah menorah.

The students of Shammai insisted that they should light eight lights on the first night, seven on the second night, and so on down to lighting one on the last night.

The students of Hillel argued in favor of starting with one light and lighting an additional one every night, concluding with eight on the final night.  And as with most instances of disagreement between these two academies, Hillel’s method won out.

The rationale was as clear as the olive oil used in the lighting the lamps.  One should increase the light each night, as with each subsequent evening ceremony we invite more light – and thus more sanctity – into our homes and into our world.  As we move forward in time, we increase the light and strengthen the sacred connection between and among members of the human race.

The miracle of the Maccabees’ military victory led to a rebirth of religious liberty for all inhabitants of the ancient land of Israel.  No longer did the Jews have to exist subservient to an occupying nation which had sought to eliminate Judaism.  The popular story of the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days inspired them to ascribe their accomplishments to God.

In our day as well, the struggle for religious freedom continues, in our country and all over the world.  Will we realize miracles in those efforts?  Will we be able to bring sanctity to those who suffer oppression from the many ‘masters’ who control the lives of others?

As with all things, it begins with us.  If we increase the holiness in our lives

• by treating people in just and fair ways;
• by eliminating gossip and slander from our speech;
• by devoting ourselves to helping friends and family through difficult situations; and
• by taking part in movements to bring repair to our world;

we too will move upward from one strength to a greater one, and we will increase the sanctity of the entire world.  We can, each day, dedicate ourselves to bringing more wholeness – and holiness – to humanity.

Happy Hanukkah!

The Death of John Kennedy: The Loss of a Dream

I have tried to be fairly objective about my feelings of today’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy, and I was successful up until this morning.

“Important milestone.”  “Marking the day pays homage to a slain leader.”  “Sensitivity to a nation’s feelings and memories has its place.”  Yada-yada-yada.

By coincidence, that day was also a Friday.  When I rose today and listened to radio reporting that reviewed that day’s events, physically powerful feelings of loss began to wash over me.  I was eight years old 50 years ago, an eager and active third grader whose parents campaigned for Kennedy because of his idealism for the progressive spirit that he would bring to our nation.  This is how our nation's future was supposed to go.

In reality, it was not the assassination of a president that affected me, but more, it was the demise of the potential of a nation on the verge of realizing great strides in civil rights, sexual equality, and the drive toward a progressive future that was passionate and potent.

Those born after that date, or those whose awareness of those events had not yet blossomed, cannot easily identify with this feeling.  Someone who was only one year old at the time recently said to me that s/he could not understand the commotion that people are making over this fateful anniversary.  It’s difficult to explain this feeling of grief for the loss of a dream, but that is what it was.

At the Time of Noah, and Today: No Compromise – No Civility

Scorched earth policy!

Misbehavior and anger everywhere!

Accusations of intentional evil to and from every quarter.

…and plenty of blame to go around.

If a Martian, who had no prior knowledge of the human race, had heard about these incidents, she would think that we were a pretty sad species.  For when we read the story of Noah and God’s destruction of all life in our world, we DO have to wonder about how low human behavior can go.

 (Oh, sorry, perhaps you thought I was writing about the US Congress and the government shutdown.)

You also have to wonder about God’s attitude toward us.  In the story of Noah, the Divine One executed a scorched earth policy against the world and its inhabitants, and – essentially – took no prisoners.

We can only imagine the extent of God’s anger, but I imagine that, similar to everything else ascribed to God, God’s resentment must have been boundless, which led to the earth’s destruction.

So regarding the era of Noah, we have to ask: How could it have gotten so bad so soon?  And what did God expect to happen when humanity was left on its own?

I can’t answer these questions.  But I am dismayed at the lack of human progress from then until now.  Sometimes we make mistakes; sometimes we are intentionally evil.  But the result can be the same in both situations: devolution in civility, and a total ignorance of how to get out of the mess.

I have to believe that we have the capacity to learn from our errors.  And I hope that, somehow, we can break out of this human pattern of disregard for civility that, according to the reckoning of the Rabbis, is perhaps 5700 years old.

In this way, we can solve our problems, and not perpetuate the evil and the inertia that plagues us as a planet and as a human race.

(These thoughts are excerpted from a D'var Torah given at Temple Beth El, Madison, WI, on Shabbat Noach, October 4-5, 2013.)

Observations from My Sabbatical Leave: The Ninth of Av, Trayvon Martin, and Race Hatred as an American Affliction

Beginning Monday evening July 15 and continuing until sundown on July 16, the world-wide Jewish community will observe the day of the Ninth of Av (in Hebrew, Tishah B’av).  This is a day on which we commemorate the destruction of the two ancient Jerusalem Temples, once in 587 BCE, and the other in the 70 CE.

At Temple Beth El, we do not observe this holy day as other congregations might.  However, on this particular Ninth of Av, it is necessary for us to acknowledge one of the lessons put forth about this sorrowful holy day by the rabbis of the Talmud, for this lesson has a direct connection to the verdict of the trial just concluded in Florida which decided the criminal case brought against George Zimmerman.

In teaching about the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome in 70 CE, the rabbis inform us that God destroyed the Temple on account of the “baseless hatred” (Hebrew: sin’at hinam) that we Jews had toward one another: During the years leading up to the destruction, the Jewish community had divided itself along many different political and ideological lines, bringing forth a great amount of vitriol and enmity toward each other.

There were ultra-religious Jews who observed the Torah word-for-word, as well as ‘interpretive-tradition’ Jews who believed that lessons of Torah had to be updated and interpreted in each era; there were also new Christians who believed that their savior had eliminated altogether the need for the Torah and its laws.

There were zealots who looked past the ideological stances of these groups, and advocated for the violent overthrow of Rome by the Israelite nation; and there were those who simply left the body of Jews in Palestine and retreated to the Dead Sea community of ascetics and hermits.

The rabbis of later years analyze the situation, and state that since we could not band together and present a united front in the battle for our land, and since we exhibited a baseless hatred toward – and a total disregard for – one another’s opinions and feelings, we deserved the fate of exile.

In America, in our times, there exist, we must acknowledge, a similar, underlying hatred and suspicion of some of our fellow citizens toward others, specifically some whites against blacks.  From calls for voter registration schemes that would disenfranchise poor and minority voters to the fear that brought about the Trayvon Martin shooting, race prejudice is still an affliction in our country that we have yet to cure.

And the thought that plagues me, as I write on this eve of the Ninth of Av, is whether and when we - as freedom loving and advocating Americans - will ever be able to rid ourselves of our racial fears and animosities, and look upon all others as beings created in God’s image.

Many issues can divide us.  Race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion, should not be the things that separate us from one another.

Observations from My Sabbatical Leave: A Journey to Auschwitz

 The physical dimensions of Auschwitz II (The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex next to Oświęcim, Poland) are difficult to describe.  It’s simply larger than belief.

It may take an hour and a half or longer to circumvent the borders of that infamous death factory where the Nazis murdered more than 1.2 million people, 90% of whom were Jewish.  During my recent visit, it took me twenty minutes to walk out of the camp, traversing the straight rail line that led into the camp and ends today at the platform where ceremonies of memory take place.  I could leave that camp, and our ancestors could not.

As I observed the rocks that lined and reinforced those rail lines, this verse from the book of Psalms came to my mind:  “The rock that the builders had rejected has become the cornerstone.”  (Psalm 118:32)  Just as those rocks have outlived the German war machine, so too have we as a people outlived the animus that sought to destroy us.  Our enemies have been destroyed, and we still exist.

It was recently my privilege to escort a group of 90 eleventh grade Reform Jewish students and their seventeen person staff through some of the Jewish historical sites of Eastern Europe.  And we traveled from the synagogues of Prague to the streets and tenements of Terezín, and from the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz to the rebirth of Jewish life in Krakow and Warsaw.

We learned there that, on the one hand, there was seemingly no limit to the Nazi atrocities of World War II.  We also learned that resistance took many forms, and there were countless Jewish Holocaust victims who would not quietly suffer injustice.

As difficult as this might be, we should include these places on our travel itineraries.  They are not comfortable places to visit, but they are significant Jewish sites where we can directly and viscerally understand what our people experienced during the Holocaust.  And we will also see that Jewish life is on the ascent, even in the very shadow of Auschwitz.