Category: Articles and Sermons

      Everyone loves the first days of chanukah. Children are excited by what gifts they may get. Parents are excited that their children might appreciate the gifts they give. We can all eat just one more latke without guilt or heartburn. The lights, small as they are fill the room.
     The last days are another story. We can’t look a potato in the eye. The children know the good presents are over, or maybe they will get socks or school supplies. The thank yous to the parents have probably stopped, even if the perfect gift was given.
     This is precisely why the last days of chanukah are probably more important than the first. Let me explain. In the Talmud there is a debate over how many candles we should light each day. The school of Shammai says we start with eight, and then count downward. This way we would know how many days were left. The school of Hillel, which we follow in general, says that we start with one, and add each day. The idea is that we increase the amount of holiness over time, and not decrease it.
     This is a great metaphor for our lives. I feel bad for people who always so, “same old, same old”, or “been there, done that.” I feel worse for the people who have to live with them or listen to them. They are bored by just about everything.
     Judaism says that every moment of every day of our lives can be filled with holiness if we bring enthusiasm and appreciation for what we do. You may have eaten a thousand sandwiches, but you have never eaten the one you are about to have for lunch. That sandwich was made out of ingredients that will never occur again exactly that same way.
     This is only a way of thinking about things, and I chose the sandwich model because I am about to eat lunch, but you get the idea. If we say to ourselves each day that the world is newly created and that we have a chance to enjoy it in a way that no one before or after us could, then we will grow in appreciation for our lives, and not be bored by even the most mundane things.
     When you light those last chanukah candles, remember that we can increase the light, the holiness, in the world each day.

 

For most of Jewish history we were lived on pretty modest means. The average  meal was some kind of fried potato dish. Children played with little toys, usually a spinning top. The only light was a small candle.

We celebrate Chanukah by eating fried potatoes, playing with a top, all by candle light. Our celebration of Chanukah looks exactly the same as daily life over the last thousand years.

Why, then, is Chanukah such a big deal if we are doing something exactly the same as we would already be doing? On Passover we eat special foods. On Sukkot we spend time in a structure completely different from our house. There is no doubting that these are holidays. Chanukah, though, if no one told you it was a holiday, you may not know it was anything special.

I believe that is precisely the point. The real miracle of the Jewish people is ordinary people doing ordinary things under extraordinary circumstances. The story of the Maccabees was the struggle to live normal Jewish lives despite the efforts of our enemies. The Maccabees did not want to conquer the territories of the Assyrian Hellenists or take their possessions. They just wanted their daily lives back.

In the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust the Jews set up children’s theaters, and literary societies. Under horrifying conditions that would have broken the spirits of so many, the Jews of the ghetto went about their ordinary lives as best they could. They were determined to live as spiritually free human beings as long as they could.

Chanukah celebrates how miraculous it often is just to get through our day. There are so many challenges, whether the economy or illness or even the general anxieties of life. Chanukah is a reminder that every day is worth celebrating.

 

When things are not going right in our lives, we often say we are not in a good place. Not just a tough time, but something that is so overwhelming it feels like a place. Everywhere you turn is another challenge and difficulty. This is when we feel most alone.

This is the story of Jacob. He was on the run from his brother who he had cheated twice. He alone for first time in his life, away from the mother who protected him.

The only thing he knows is where he is leaving, not where he is going. He has no plan, no home, and no friends. Jacob is in a very bad place.

At night in the wilderness he dreams of a stairway reaching to heaven, with God at the head.

God tells Jacob, no matter where you are in life, I will be there for you, and I will be there for your descendants. Your descendants will be a blessing for the whole world. The whole world, not just people of Israel.

Jacob wakes up and says something strange. He says, “God was in this place, but I did not know it.” I don’t think this refers to geographic location. I think it means that Jacob did not think that God could find him when he was in such a bad place. He thought he had cut himself off from everyone and everything, which is why everything felt so dark.

God is saying to Jacob that the purpose of life is to help everyone realize that no one needs to be alone. God is always there with us. This does not mean God does everything we want. It does mean that God always cares about us, and wants to know how we are doing.

Your worst time in life, when you say you are not in a good place, can still feel like a house of God. You can find meaning when things do not go your way, because there is not a moment of your life that God is not available.

In the Book of Psalms it says, “For God, the darkness is not dark.”

The light is always there, but our sadness and anxiety often blocks it out.

This is why the verse, “God was in this place, but I did not know it.” is on the ark of Adat Shalom Synagogue.

Our congregation is a place to be when you are in a bad or dark place, not just when we are ready to praise or thank God. It is a good place to be when you feel loneliness and anxiety and frustration.

Even when we are just by ourselves, we never have to feel alone, or that we are in a bad place we cannot get out of.

When we come together, no matter what, and when we turn our hearts upward out of the darkness into the light that is always there and when we realize that God is found even in the darkness, we learn that it is always possible to be in a good place in our lives.

 

In the beginning of the Torah, it seems like men are having the children all by themselves. This man sired that child, that man sired another, and so on. This probably spoke to the status of men in society at the time in terms of the child’s identity.

By the time of Sarah and Abraham, both parents are mentioned. After Sarah dies, the Torah says that Abraham sired Isaac, but does not mention Sarah. I do not think that the Torah is ignoring Sarah, but emphasizing that Abraham still acted like a parent to Isaac after some difficult situations that could have ended their relationship.

Sarah’s death caused Abraham tremendous grief, but also a bit of guilt. If you remember, Abraham never told Sarah that he was taking Isaac to be sacrificed. She never would have permitted this. There is a tradition that Sarah was told by another that Abraham took Isaac away, and she died of a broken heart before she had a chance to find out that the sacrifice never occurred.

I also have to imagine that Isaac started to feel distanced from his father after being tied up and almost killed by him. That would drive a wedge between anyone.

Abraham could have distanced himself from Isaac. He could have used his grief as an excuse. He may have subconsciously distanced himself because he felt he hurt his son. Instead, the Torah is telling us that Abraham remained engaged with Isaac in his life, and still acted like a father.

Their relationship may have been awkward and they did not speak as much as before their traumas. Nonetheless, Abraham never gave up on being a father.

So many people in their sadness cut themselves off from those who love them and need them. So many parents, grandparents, other relatives and friends cut themselves off from people they think they hurt or let down.

We are never going to be perfect, and we are never going to handle everything really well, especially when we are not at our best. Our loved ones, though, do not need us to be perfect. They just need us to be there for them and to be concerned for them.

Thanksgiving 2011

I love Thanksgiving. I love the Food. I remember as a child the carving the kishka, and the maztah balls with marshmallows. The usual. Okay, not really, but we always have traditional foods and they are great.

I love the football games. Most of them. Some years more than others. I really hope Thursday at least leaves Lions fans with some dignity.

The best part of Thanksgiving of course is time with friends and family. Most families go around the table and talk about what they are thankful for. Good thing to do. It is important to remember how much people do for us, and how many good things there are in our lives, even when things are challenging.

This is also the time people think about how much others were not thankful for them and what they did. They did something for others, but do not feel properly appreciated. There can be lingering resentments.

There might be a number of reasons you were not thanked.

1-They did not know what you did for them.

2-What you did was not really as great as what you thought you did, or that they really did not want you did, or that they really would have been happier if you did not do that thing. (The end of that idea was contributed by my wife Ruth. One reason you should be thankful to her is that she has prevented a lot of really bad sermons.)

3-They did thank you, but you did not think it was sufficient, or you were not really paying attention.

4-They appreciated it, but did not know how to express it properly. A lot of our loved ones mean well, but it does not always come out right.

Jewish tradition has an interesting approach that I am beginning to understand.
There is a phrase in our ethical literature that says, “The reward of a mitzvah (a kind and compassionate act) is an opportunity to do another mitzvah.

When you do an act of kindness for someone else, your reward is another opportunity to do another act of kindness. No promise of material prosperity or spiritual salvation in this world or the next. No promise of thanks. Just another opportunity to help others.
Tough sell. Hard to advertise in one sentence. Live Jewishly, work hard for others, and you will get a chance to do more work.

I believe this approach contains a key to happiness
The reward of doing this act of kindness is recognizing that it is a worthy thing to do, that we are living our lives in a meaningful way, and that what we do matters.

There will always be these opportunities. We never have to wonder what to do with our lives. Every moment is an opportunity to help, no matter what it is we do.

We can cherish the gratitude. I am not that modest. I do enjoy recognition as much as anyone else. The difference with this approach is that we no longer need the recognition.

I would add that if our efforts are constantly being ignored or diminished, it is okay to find others to share the good things in your life. Don’t be a victim.

This thanksgiving ask if what we are doing for others is what they really need.

If it is, be thankful you can help. That is the best reward we can ever have.

There is an old saying that the most important thing in life is not the destination, but the journey. I believe that is only partly true. There is no destination. All of life is the journey. There may be pauses and stops along the way, but they are never permanent.

So much suffering in our lives comes from the belief that everything will work out exactly the way we want it to. Unfortunately, this causes us to miss so many other wonderful things and opportunities.

I think it is fascinating that the Torah itself tries to send us this message through its very structure. In most books there is a beginning, a middle and an end. We are usually disappointed and angry if the ending does not go the way we want or envisioned. Could you imagine what the fans of Harry Potter would have said if Valdemort just went home safely at the end of the series? It would not have been pretty.

The Torah, the Five Books of Moses, though, does not have a real end. God assures our ancestors that they would live in the promised land. That seems to be the entire point of liberating the Hebrews from Egypt.

At the end of the Torah, though, the people are still waiting to enter into the land. It would almost have made more sense for there to be a sixth book of the Torah. It should have included the Book of Joshua which includes the conquest of the land.

Even though the Torah does not end the way we would have expected, we still celebrate the completion of reading it every year on Simchat Torah. The Torah is teaching us that it is possible to live a meaningful life even when things do not go the way we thought or the way we wanted.

This is particularly important to remember as we begin the Jewish New Year. We think that this will be the year when everything finally comes together in the way that we have dreamed. We will lose the weight or gain it. We will get the recognition from friends, family and work in the way we know we deserve.

I certainly hope for everyone that things that have been difficult will become easier and less painful, but I can promise you it will not be perfect. Change is inevitable and unstoppable.

Change does not have to cause suffering. Change can be a time for growth and an opportunity to increase our compassion and kindness to others, especially since we know that everyone is faced with challenges.

The most important thing we can do with our lives is help others with their journeys. We can teach our loved ones courage and strength when things do not work out as planned. We can teach gratitude when they do, coupled with the recognition that these are not forever either, but part of our lifelong journey.

I wish us joy in everything we do, in where we think we are going, but mostly, joy in everywhere we are.

 

 

The oldest piece of biblical writing ever discovered is the priestly blessing, the Birkat HaKohanim, from today’s Torah portion. It was found on an amulet from almost three thousand years ago. It is the world’s oldest blessing in
continuing use.

It is part of one of my favorite aspects of the holiday service,
particularly the High Holidays. The blessing is recited by the
descendants of the priesthood in a service called duchaning.  The
Duchan is the platform the priesthood stood on in the Holy Temple in
Jerusalem when they blessed the people. It is the last thing we do
from the time of Temple that is exactly the same today as it was
then.

The blessing is also part of the morning service every day. There was a
debate whether a layperson or a non priest could say it. The answer
is that everyone can, because we are all to be a nation of priests, a
nation that is a blessing for all.

We say the blessing during the morning service as a reminder that all
people are worthy of blessing and that all people have great
potential for goodness. This is especially important for the leaders
of our people to remember. In fact one may not lead services if one
does not love and respect the congregation.

Birkat HaKohanim is the blessing we give children every Friday night. I want
to focus one aspect of the blessing in particular.The third section
is yisa hashem panav ailecha vyasem lecha shalom. Literally, God will
lift His face toward you and give you peace. It is a strange phrase.
It should be God will lower his face toward you.

I think this means that God believes in our potential goodness so much,
that He would have to look up to us.

This is important to keep in mind when we are a part of any child’s life.
Each child has the potential to be the kind of person we look up to,
a person of strength and moral courage and kindness.  This is not always obvious or apparent all the time, but that potential is always there.

Each one of us, too, has this potential inside of us regardless of age.
This is why we say the blessing every day. We should never say it is
too late to accomplish our goals in life, as long as those are goals
that will benefit others and not just ourselves.

Each of us can be a person that God looks up to.

 

The exodus from Egypt was one of the great revolutions in human history. A group of slaves escaped one of the most powerful empires in the world. It was terrifying, but exciting at the same time. It promised a new beginning and a new promise of hope for the people.

Our Torah portion this week takes place a year after the exodus from Egypt. The excitement is over, but the goal of the promised land is a long way away. This is really the hard part. How do you maintain a community, and a family and an individual sense of self under these conditions. This is what our portion is really about.

The name of it is Bamidbar, which means “in the wilderness.” It does not mean desert. A wilderness may have food and water in one place, but not the other. It might have good weather at one time, but not at others. It may be empty in places, or filled with animals, or even other people. Some of these people are friendly some are not. Wilderness is beyond our control. Our ability to find meaning in the wilderness is within our power.

Most of life is the wilderness. There are many beginnings that are exciting. Graduations, new jobs, weddings. After a while, the adrenalin wears off, but you still have the responsibilities. Things don’t always go as planned. You don’t always reach your goal.

A lot of people refuse to believe that life is more wilderness than new beginning and suffer for it. Not only do people feel frustrated about what they don’t have, they miss all the wonderful things they do have.

The torah recognizes that there is only one really way to confront the wilderness, and that is by having a spiritual center in our lives. God tells moses to build the tabernacle, the mishkan, the place of God’s presence, and to place the tribes equally around it. The tabernacle is literally the center of their lives, and goes where they go.

We have access to a variety of spiritual centers. Some are communal, like synagogues and schools and community centers. Important to have real places to go to at all times in our lives.

Family and home is also a spiritual center, or at least we should be trying to make it so. There are all different kinds of family today, and we have to understand and embrace that. This world is too hard to go through alone. Every person in a family needs to feel loved and safe. We cannot just assume that this is true within our own families. We need to have real conversations with each other about how to make our families into centers of unconditional support and love even when we do not agree with each other on everything.

The most important spiritual center we need to develop is within ourselves. We need to recognize that within us already is the deepest potential for spirituality, because a spark of God is within each person. Sometimes we think that we need to learn all the prayers and study all the texts and follow every commandment. We feel there is some sort of goal to be achieved if we work hard enough. We feel there is a way out of the spiritual wilderness, and that we will have all the answers and always be happy. There are religious leaders who sell this idea. I believe they are doing a people a terrible disservice. People tend to feel like failures because they cannot achieve this level of spirituality.

Notice, though that the Torah ends before the people cross into the Holy Land.
Judaism is not about having all the answers. It is not about reaching religious perfection or salvation. It is about providing a center and balance to our lives that helps us appreciate every moment of our lives even when things do not go according to plan.

There are so many things we can do. Every act of kindness might be the one thing a person needed to get through the challenge of that day. Every prayer offered, no matter how small or informal, might be the thing that gives a person strength to go on. Every word of encouragement to someone who feels they failed can give them the courage to try again.

Judaism, then, is about helping everyone through their own journey through the wilderness, letting them know they are loved know matter what, that they have a home and center in this world. We can make this wilderness of a world that we live in feel like the promised land.

 

Here are the words I shared this morning:

 Many people turn to religion because they have a deep spiritual hunger, and feel there is a hole in their heart or in their soul. They believe there are answers to life’s mysteries and solutions to all our problems. If we just prayed enough, or studied enough we would achieve enlightenment and perfect equanimity. We would never get angry again or sad. The world would no longer be scary.

Among this group are people who had one incredible spiritual moment, when everything came together and made sense.

They spend the rest of their lives chasing that feeling, but are usually frustrated. They believe if they could recreate that moment, all their problems would be solved. The moment never returns. Their lives are still confusing, and a day-to-day struggle to keep up.

This is a challenge even for clergy. Many of us became rabbis or cantors because we had one extraordinary moment, and then dedicated our lives to finding it again for ourselves, or at least helping others find theirs. I will admit that I am one of them.

Many of us who pursue more spirituality oriented lives think that we will be enlightened at the end of the process, that we will never be thrown off-balance, and that everyone will respond to our enlightenment by doing pretty much everything we say. This rarely happens.

Suzuki Roshi had a great comment. He said there are no enlightened people, just enlightened activities. That is, there is not permanent happy state of mind, only opportunities to be helpful and kind to others, opportunities to fight for the freedom and well-being of others.

This is the overall theme of our Torah portion.

The people had just stood at Sinai, the greatest revelation of God and spirituality in human history. They probably assumed everything would be perfect from then on. No more messiness, no more difficult relationships, no more real effort.

That is not what happens. In our Torah portion we see that life continued to be an endless series of challenges and dangers and unpredictable events. There are ethical dilemmas that are not solvable, only manageable.

As Jack Kornfeld puts it, after the ecstasy, you still have to do the laundry.

Religion is not about solving and fixing everything. It is not even about understanding everything. If that is what we are waiting to happen, we will wait for the rest of our lives in increased frustration, or we may just abandon the spiritual quest. Any religion or at least religious leader that promises that if you follow all of its tenets you will no longer have problems is either fraudulent or delusional.

I believe that we should try to understand things as much as possible, to make the attempt to understand how the world works, what motivates people and what matters most to us. We should study history and science and psychology and art. At some point though, we have to give up the idea that we can understand why everything happens, especially things that are painful. For some situations, there will never be satisfying answers.

What then is the ultimate value of religion? I cannot speak on behalf of other faiths. I would like to share what it is about Judaism that I find so helpful.

Judaism to me is about having the courage and strength to face those challenges, and the kindness and compassion to help other people face theirs. It is about knowing that we are part of a people who stood together at Sinai, and then struggled through an uncertain future together, until they made it into the promised land. And even then, they knew their work was not done. They knew that life is not a mystery to be solved, but an opportunity for growth in wisdom and kindness, for appreciating the treasure of our lives, and for helping others, both our loved ones and strangers, to live meaningful and loving lives.

 

Some of my best friends are professors of Jewish history. They are wonderful people, and love what they do. However, they spend a lot of time trying to make sense of something completely illogical and improbable, namely the continued existence flourishing of the Jewish people.

If the history of the Jewish people were a novel it would already be on the discount sale rack because the story is just so preposterous. We should have vanished into history many times over, but here we are.

The questions I would like to look at are where do we come from, why are we still here, and what are we here for?

Let’s take a quick look at the last thirty eight hundred years of Jewish history, because I want to show you that at no point was our survival as a people predictable or probable. Even our origin defies logic.

Think about Abraham and Sarah. God wants to start a new people. Who would you start with? Would you pick an elderly couple who was childless, homeless and jobless? Probably not, but that is who Abraham and Sarah were. God chose them because they were always on the side of the oppressed, the disenfranchised and those for whom society could find no use. They saw things in others that no one else did and created the family that would become the Jewish people.

Let’s go forward 1800 years. In the year 70 the Romans destroyed the Holy Temple of Jerusalem and set in motion the exile of the Jewish people around the world that would last into our own time. The reason you destroy a temple is to show that your god is more powerful than the god of the people you conquered. It would be logical and reasonable for that people to adopt the god or gods of their conquerors. We did not do that. We believed that God was not done with us, that God still loved us, though, it must be admitted that it seems at times God has a funny way of showing that love. Nonetheless, the Jews who went through that terrible period persisted in their faith.

The Jews of that time had, though, in some ways a bigger problem than the Roman occupation. The temple and its system of sacrifice was the one place for Jews that served for the expiation and forgiveness of sin. If you could not have your sins forgiven, then you could not have a relationship with God. Therefore, Judaism really should have stopped there. Instead, our sages said that there was a substitute for sacrifice that God actually preferred. That is Torah study, prayer, and acts of kindness to others above and beyond the minimum. This becomes Judaism as we know it today.

The sages created a system that was no longer dependent on a particular place, nor on an elitist priesthood, and made it accessible to every Jew, including those who went into exile. You cannot carry a temple with you, but you can carry your heart, mind and soul. Acts of kindness toward others, Jewish or not Jewish, was the equivalent of the high priest bringing the Yom Kippur sacrifice.

The idea was so revolutionary and against any conventional thinking about religion, that if they were to try it today they would be scorned by the very people who benefited from their courage.

Our sages, though, believed that we still had something to offer the world, the belief that might does not make right, and that there is no one stronger than the one that shows kindness to others, even during the worst of circumstances, even when it seems that that world has gone dark.

A thousand years later were the Crusades which destroyed so many Jewish communities of Europe. At this same time, Rashi and his students were writing some of the greatest Torah commentaries of all time, commentaries we study to this day. If you read their works, you would never guess the complete chaos of their lives. They refused to give in to that chaos, and created intellectual beauty, because they still believed in the essential or at least potential goodness of humanity.

Four hundred years later is the Spanish inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It is also the flourishing of Jewish mysticism, of kabbalah, as we know it. The kabbalists knew that their physical homes may be under threats from others, but the spiritual homes they built were permanent and eternal.

The most extraordinary period in all of Jewish history was of course the middle of the twentieth century. The holocaust should have meant an end to Judaism. Who would ever want to be Jewish afterward? Who would ever want to raise a Jewish family again? One of the most impressive acts of courage was the fact that so many survivors began families after everything they went through. Some of them started new families after having lost everyone in their previous family. They refused to allow the darkness to win.

Who could have imagined after such devastation, after such helplessness, that we would have our own country, or that in other countries such as America you would have more synagogues and yeshivot and day school and religious schools than in any point in our history? We should have disappeared from history, but instead we became a critical part of the world.

It sounds like a big part of being Jewish is experiencing tragedy. There are some who say that we have suffered more than anyone else in history. We certainly have had our share, but everybody suffers. The difference is that while so many other people’s have vanished or became marginal after their suffering, we have always found ways to recreate ourselves and continue to grow and develop.

None of this was predictable. None of this was logical. How did it happen? I think what we see is that throughout our history, we have always made a commitment to find meaning in life in times of tragedy and optimism in times of despair. We have always found light in the darkness, and have tried to bring that light to others. I believe that is the main reason for the Jewish people, and what we must always do if we are to continue as a people. If we do not, then Judaism becomes empty ritual and ethnic exclusivity.

The idea of revealing the light hidden in the world has been built into all aspects of Judaism since its beginning. In the Torah, the first thing that God creates is light. It cannot be sunlight, because the sun is not created until the fourth day. The kabbalists understand that light to be God’s spirit on earth. The world was a place of darkness and chaos, and God bring light and warmth to it. When humanity is cruel, then that light diminishes. When humanity is kind, then the light it revealed. Judaism, both in ritual and practice is about revealing that light.

On Shabbat we have two sets of light. Friday night when it begins, and Saturday night when it ends. The first set of lights are for you and your family at the end of the week. It is a reminder of the spark of God found within each of us, and a sign that we somehow made it through a week we may have thought we could not have. The lights of havdallah, though, are for us to bring that light with us wherever we go during the week. It is to remind us to be a source of light and comfort to everyone we encounter, including people we find difficult. It is amazing how quickly a kind word can change a challenging person into a grateful one.

The most famous lights of all are probably the Chanukah candles. This is more than bringing some light during the darkest time of the year, but remembering that we have survived the darkest moments in history and are here to celebrate. I want to share a story with you that I find so powerful. Our enemies have always tried to demoralize our leaders, because if the leader gives in, then all the followers will, too. During the holocaust a chasidic rabbi and his followers were all brought into a large warehouse. They had been in the camp for a while and were on the verge of starvation. The commandant of the camp when up to the rabbi and asked him if he would like the stick of margarine in his hand, which had enough calories to sustain a person for a number of days. All he had to do was fall on his knees and beg. The followers assumed the rabbi would refuse, but the rabbi begged. The commandant laughed, put the margarine on the floor, and ground it with the heel of his boot. He then left the warehouse to tell the others of how he had gotten the rabbi to beg. As soon as the commandant left, the rabbi told his disciples, “Don’t you know tonight is chanukah.” He pulled a button off his jacket, pulled off a few threads for a wick, gathered the margarine, and created a menorah. When the commandant returned, he found four hundred Jews singing maoz tzur. I wish I could tell you that they were all saved. They weren’t, but for that moment they showed the potential of the human spirit.

This is what it means when God tells us to be a light to the nations of the world. A light to nations, not to the world as a whole, but each nation and its individual needs. It is our task to help each country find the best within themselves. This is one of the reasons it is hard to neatly define the Jewish people. Who we are depends so much on where we live, and the people with whom we live. The goal is always the same, to make wherever we live better for all people. Every country we have lived in has been better because of us. It is no just a matter of business or science and technology. We have helped spread democracy and tolerance. We have stood up for the poor and disenfranchised often against our own economic interests. We have risked our lives for others, even those who do not love us. We have shown that loyalty to the country you live in and loyalty to your faith are not a compromise, but the fulfillment of that faith.

Jewish mysticism says that when God was creating the world he tried to contain the light in special vessels, but those vessels shattered. The shards of those vessels fell to earth, with a spark of that light attached to each broken peace.

The chasidic masters understood this as a metaphor for all the brokenness in people, that could be repaired if we found that spark of light within them.

This why so many Jews created organizations like JARC, Yad Ezra, Kadima and Friendship Circle, and have supported endless numbers of non-Jewish charities.

It is why so many Jews got involved in civil rights. For example, the late rabbi Ernst Conrad was in Germany during kristallnacht. He ironically had just left a Wagner opera, when the riots began all around him. When he came to America, he fought for the rights of others, because he knew that the oppression of one group leads to the oppression of all.

The idea that each person has a spark of God within is even a reason that so many Jews became therapists. There is evidence that even Sigmund Freud was influenced by this idea of finding the light within the shards of the shattered vessel. Psychotherapy and other therapeutic treatments became a way of repairing the world, and saving people from the darkness of their lives.

The chasidic rabbis even extended this idea to how we think about our enemies. We must always defend ourselves, but we must still remember that our enemies are human, and have within them a spark of God as well, deeply buried as it may be. We must fight our enemies, not by our enemies standards, but by the standards of Jewish ethics. Psalm 27, the Psalm for the high holidays, says, Do not put within me the spirit of my enemies.

When we remember this we have done well. Our worst defeats have been when we have forgotten this. There is nothing greater that we can do than transform hatred into enlightenment. I believe this is the reason that we have returned to the land of Israel. It was not to build a Jewish fortress, but to help create a promised land for everyone. It is taking longer than we would like, but there is a reason that the national anthem is called Hatikvah, the hope. To be a Jew means to always have hope, even when there does not seem to be a chance. There is nothing logical about this hope, but as I have mentioned nothing about our history is logical. We might be the ones who truly see the dream of our ancestors fulfilled, that nation will not lift up sword against nation, and that humanity will no longer no war.

In every synagogue in the world there is an eternal light. It means that every generation before us defied the reality of the world, defied all the forces that tried to extinguish what was best in humanity, and chose life. It is also a challenge to us to stay strong, to not become bitter or cynical, and to embrace lives of meaning for us, our loved ones, and all of humanity even when things seem hopeless. If we do, we will be the light of a splendid and brilliant future.

Yom Kippur 2010

Rabbi Aaron Bergman

 

Some of my best friends are professors of Jewish history. They are wonderful people, and love what they do. However, they spend a lot of time trying to make sense of something completely illogical and improbable, namely the continued existence flourishing of the Jewish people.

 

If the history of the Jewish people were a novel it would already be on the discount sale rack because the story is just so preposterous. We should have vanished into history many times over, but here we are.

 

The questions I would like to look at are where do we come from, why are we still here, and what are we here for?

 

Let’s take a quick look at the last thirty eight hundred years of Jewish history, because I want to show you that at no point was our survival as a people predictable or probable. Even our origin defies logic.

 

Think about Abraham and Sarah. God wants to start a new people. Who would you start with? Would you pick an elderly couple who was childless, homeless and jobless? Probably not, but that is who Abraham and Sarah were. God chose them because they were always on the side of the oppressed, the disenfranchised and those for whom society could find no use. They saw things in others that no one else did and created the family that would become the Jewish people.

 

Let’s go forward 1800 years. In the year 70 the Romans destroyed the Holy Temple of Jerusalem and set in motion the exile of the Jewish people around the world that would last into our own time. The reason you destroy a temple is to show that your god is more powerful than the god of the people you conquered. It would be logical and reasonable for that people to adopt the god or gods of their conquerors. We did not do that. We believed that God was not done with us, that God still loved us, though, it must be admitted that it seems at times God has a funny way of showing that love. Nonetheless, the Jews who went through that terrible period persisted in their faith.

 

The Jews of that time had, though, in some ways a bigger problem than the Roman occupation. The temple and its system of sacrifice was the one place for Jews that served for the expiation and forgiveness of sin. If you could not have your sins forgiven, then you could not have a relationship with God. Therefore, Judaism really should have stopped there. Instead, our sages said that there was a substitute for sacrifice that God actually preferred. That is Torah study, prayer, and acts of kindness to others above and beyond the minimum. This becomes Judaism as we know it today.

 

The sages created a system that was no longer dependent on a particular place, nor on an elitist priesthood, and made it accessible to every Jew, including those who went into exile. You cannot carry a temple with you, but you can carry your heart, mind and soul. Acts of kindness toward others, Jewish or not Jewish, was the equivalent of the high priest bringing the Yom Kippur sacrifice.

 

The idea was so revolutionary and against any conventional thinking about religion, that if they were to try it today they would be scorned by the very people who benefited from their courage.

 

Our sages, though, believed that we still had something to offer the world, the belief that might does not make right, and that there is no one stronger than the one that shows kindness to others, even during the worst of circumstances, even when it seems that that world has gone dark.

 

A thousand years later were the Crusades which destroyed so many Jewish communities of Europe. At this same time, Rashi and his students were writing some of the greatest Torah commentaries of all time, commentaries we study to this day. If you read their works, you would never guess the complete chaos of their lives. They refused to give in to that chaos, and created intellectual beauty, because they still believed in the essential or at least potential goodness of humanity.

 

Four hundred years later is the Spanish inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It is also the flourishing of Jewish mysticism, of kabbalah, as we know it. The kabbalists knew that their physical homes may be under threats from others, but the spiritual homes they built were permanent and eternal.

 

The most extraordinary period in all of Jewish history was of course the middle of the twentieth century. The holocaust should have meant an end to Judaism. Who would ever want to be Jewish afterward? Who would ever want to raise a Jewish family again? One of the most impressive acts of courage was the fact that so many survivors began families after everything they went through. Some of them started new families after having lost everyone in their previous family. They refused to allow the darkness to win.

 

Who could have imagined after such devastation, after such helplessness, that we would have our own country, or that in other countries such as America you would have more synagogues and yeshivot and day school and religious schools than in any point in our history? We should have disappeared from history, but instead we became a critical part of the world.

 

It sounds like a big part of being Jewish is experiencing tragedy. There are some who say that we have suffered more than anyone else in history. We certainly have had our share, but everybody suffers. The difference is that while so many other people’s have vanished or became marginal after their suffering, we have always found ways to recreate ourselves and continue to grow and develop.

 

None of this was predictable. None of this was logical. How did it happen? I think what we see is that throughout our history, we have always made a commitment to find meaning in life in times of tragedy and optimism in times of despair. We have always found light in the darkness, and have tried to bring that light to others. I believe that is the main reason for the Jewish people, and what we must always do if we are to continue as a people. If we do not, then Judaism becomes empty ritual and ethnic exclusivity.

 

The idea of revealing the light hidden in the world has been built into all aspects of Judaism since its beginning. In the Torah, the first thing that God creates is light. It cannot be sunlight, because the sun is not created until the fourth day. The kabbalists understand that light to be God’s spirit on earth. The world was a place of darkness and chaos, and God bring light and warmth to it. When humanity is cruel, then that light diminishes. When humanity is kind, then the light it revealed. Judaism, both in ritual and practice is about revealing that light.

 

On Shabbat we have two sets of light. Friday night when it begins, and Saturday night when it ends. The first set of lights are for you and your family at the end of the week. It is a reminder of the spark of God found within each of us, and a sign that we somehow made it through a week we may have thought we could not have. The lights of havdallah, though, are for us to bring that light with us wherever we go during the week. It is to remind us to be a source of light and comfort to everyone we encounter, including people we find difficult. It is amazing how quickly a kind word can change a challenging person into a grateful one.

 

The most famous lights of all are probably the Chanukah candles. This is more than bringing some light during the darkest time of the year, but remembering that we have survived the darkest moments in history and are here to celebrate. I want to share a story with you that I find so powerful. Our enemies have always tried to demoralize our leaders, because if the leader gives in, then all the followers will, too. During the holocaust a chasidic rabbi and his followers were all brought into a large warehouse. They had been in the camp for a while and were on the verge of starvation. The commandant of the camp when up to the rabbi and asked him if he would like the stick of margarine in his hand, which had enough calories to sustain a person for a number of days. All he had to do was fall on his knees and beg. The followers assumed the rabbi would refuse, but the rabbi begged. The commandant laughed, put the margarine on the floor, and ground it with the heel of his boot. He then left the warehouse to tell the others of how he had gotten the rabbi to beg. As soon as the commandant left, the rabbi told his disciples, “Don’t you know tonight is chanukah.” He pulled a button off his jacket, pulled off a few threads for a wick, gathered the margarine, and created a menorah. When the commandant returned, he found four hundred Jews singing maoz tzur. I wish I could tell you that they were all saved. They weren’t, but for that moment they showed the potential of the human spirit.

 

This is what it means when God tells us to be a light to the nations of the world. A light to nations, not to the world as a whole, but each nation and its individual needs. It is our task to help each country find the best within themselves. This is one of the reasons it is hard to neatly define the Jewish people. Who we are depends so much on where we live, and the people with whom we live. The goal is always the same, to make wherever we live better for all people. Every country we have lived in has been better because of us. It is no just a matter of business or science and technology. We have helped spread democracy and tolerance. We have stood up for the poor and disenfranchised often against our own economic interests. We have risked our lives for others, even those who do not love us. We have shown that loyalty to the country you live in and loyalty to your faith are not a compromise, but the fulfillment of that faith.

 

Jewish mysticism says that when God was creating the world he tried to contain the light in special vessels, but those vessels shattered. The shards of those vessels fell to earth, with a spark of that light attached to each broken peace.

 

The chasidic masters understood this as a metaphor for all the brokenness in people, that could be repaired if we found that spark of light within them.

 

This why so many Jews created organizations like JARC, Yad Ezra, Kadima and Friendship Circle, and have supported endless numbers of non-Jewish charities.

 

It is why so many Jews got involved in civil rights. For example, the late rabbi Ernst Conrad was in Germany during kristallnacht. He ironically had just left a Wagner opera, when the riots began all around him. When he came to America, he fought for the rights of others, because he knew that the oppression of one group leads to the oppression of all.

 

The idea that each person has a spark of God within is even a reason that so many Jews became therapists. There is evidence that even Sigmund Freud was influenced by this idea of finding the light within the shards of the shattered vessel. Psychotherapy and other therapeutic treatments became a way of repairing the world, and saving people from the darkness of their lives.

 

The chasidic rabbis even extended this idea to how we think about our enemies. We must always defend ourselves, but we must still remember that our enemies are human, and have within them a spark of God as well, deeply buried as it may be. We must fight our enemies, not by our enemies standards, but by the standards of Jewish ethics. Psalm 27, the Psalm for the high holidays, says, Do not put within me the spirit of my enemies.

When we remember this we have done well. Our worst defeats have been when we have forgotten this. There is nothing greater that we can do than transform hatred into enlightenment. I believe this is the reason that we have returned to the land of Israel. It was not to build a Jewish fortress, but to help create a promised land for everyone. It is taking longer than we would like, but there is a reason that the national anthem is called Hatikvah, the hope. To be a Jew means to always have hope, even when there does not seem to be a chance. There is nothing logical about this hope, but as I have mentioned nothing about our history is logical. We might be the ones who truly see the dream of our ancestors fulfilled, that nation will not lift up sword against nation, and that humanity will no longer no war.

 

In every synagogue in the world there is an eternal light. It means that every generation before us defied the reality of the world, defied all the forces that tried to extinguish what was best in humanity, and chose life. It is also a challenge to us to stay strong, to not become bitter or cynical, and to embrace lives of meaning for us, our loved ones, and all of humanity even when things seem hopeless. If we do, we will be the light of a splendid and brilliant future.