Cedric Cal was born to a single mother, in a family that lived below the poverty line on Chicago’s West Side. His father had left the family, married another woman and had very little to do with him. His mother Olivia worked constantly, doing her best to keep her family together. As the oldest of four, Cedric became the de facto father of the family and was entrusted with protecting his younger brother, who was legally blind.

Cedric’s family moved around a lot and he learned very early on how to make friends quickly. He liked sports, particularly baseball – and when his family lived on the West Side, he played sports in the local Park District. When they moved to the South Side, however, there were no Park District services available, so sports were not an option for him. Still, no matter where they moved, Olivia became very adept at finding ways of getting Cedric and and brothers into decent public schools. From 5th to 8th grade, he attended Alcott Elementary. Minding his younger brother, he took the public bus every day on a long trek from the West Side to Lincoln Park.

Cedric’s mother taught him how to fill out applications and interview for jobs, but there really weren’t any to be found. And those that were hiring certainly weren’t hiring African-American teenage boys. He was never really successful at finding a real job, but when he was 14 he learned that he could make money dealing drugs. He knew that his mother would be beyond furious if she ever found out, so he made sure to keep his drug dealing and his growing gang activity secret from her. Cedric never, ever, brought his earnings into their home – his mother had made it clear that drug money was not welcome anywhere near her house. Even when he bought a car, he parked it far away from their home.

I met and spoke with Cedric two weeks ago at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. He explained to me that as he continued to sell drugs, as he continued the gang life, little by little, he became “desensitized to the things my mother had taught me.” It was quite poignant and sweet to listen to Cedric speak about his mother. “My mother,” he said, “has a lovely spirit,” adding: “I was scared to death of my mother.” He told me of one instance in which Olivia confronted drug dealers on a street corner with a two by four in her hand. Cedric laughed and said that even the toughest gang members in the neighborhood were scared of his mother.

The incident that changed Cedric’s life forever occurred in 1992, when he was 17 years old. According to court testimony, two individuals confronted what would become the three in front of a house on the West Side. In the ensuing gunfight, they shot and killed two of the men and wounded a third. Following the incident, the surviving victim, who was gravely wounded, identified Cedric and another man to the police as the shooters. They were both arrested – and although Cedric was legally still a minor at the time of the shooting, he was sentenced to prison for life without possibility of parole. There has never been any physical evidence – or any other evidence for that matter – that linked Cedric to the shooting and Cedric has always maintained his innocence.

There’s something of a twist to this story. Nearly twenty years later, the wounded witness, Willie Johnson, recanted his testimony. He came forward and testified at a post-conviction hearing that he had wrongly identified Cedric and his co-defendent. He explained that he did this only because the actual murderer had threatened to kill him and his family at the time. The judge however, rejected Johnson’s revised testimony and refused to reverse the convictions. (In an even more perverse twist to this story, although his recanted testimony was rejected, the witness was subsequently charged with perjury.)

When he first entered prison, Cedric joined a gang for protection, as many inmates do. He told me his first few years inside were enormously difficult until he met a man who would have an powerful impact on his life – an ex-gang leader who had become a devout Muslim. Cedric’s new mentor gave him book after book to read, and he read them voraciously. Cedric was particularly affected by “The Autobiography of Malcom X.” He identified deeply with Malcolm’s journey and struggle and was especially moved when he read about his religious awakening in prison. Like Malcolm, Cedric was inspired to convert to Islam and turn his life in a different direction.

As it turned out, his new found Muslim faith took him down a fairly dangerous road in prison. After making the decision to live as an observant Muslim, his fellow gang members approached him and told him he would have to choose between his gang and his newly acquired faith. Cedric chose his faith, knowing full well that this would obviously mean the loss of his protected status. In a very real sense, he was now putting his life in God’s hands.

The next major spiritual transformation for Cedric occurred when the Million Man March took place in 1995 in Washington DC. He was deeply moved by the sight of hundreds of thousands black men, gathered together nonviolently in one place, publicly atoning and taking responsibility for their own lives and for their families. After he witnessed this moment, Cedric decided to embark upon his own journey of repentance.

Specifically speaking, this meant following an eight stage atonement process as developed by Minister Louis Farrakhan. As part of his atonement, Cedric wrote letters. First he wrote a long letter to his mother, in which he apologized for betraying the values she taught him and for the shame he had brought to her through his actions. He vowed that he would devote the rest his life to bringing honor back to her and the family. He wrote similar letters to each of his brothers, apologizing for being absent to them as a big brother and as a role model. He also wrote a letter to his entire community – published in the community paper – and apologized, among other things, for bringing drugs, crime and gang activity into their neighborhood.

I asked Cedric to define forgiveness for me. He said that for him it was all about relationship. Seeking forgiveness meant repairing his relationships with others – and first and foremost, his relationship to God. He added that prayer plays a very central role in this process and that over time, his prayers have helped him achieve a spiritual cleansing – an unburdening his soul. He said that atonement is a never-ending process. He told me, with simple determination in his voice, that he will never stop working at making things right with others and with God.

Cedric is a warm, genuine and open-spirited man. He was happy to tell me his story and clearly took great pleasure in relating his spiritual journey. When we first met, I explained to him that I was interested in hearing his story because I wanted to give a sermon about his experiences during a Yom Kippur service. His lawyer began to explain what Yom Kippur is and he smiled and said, “Oh, I know all about Yom Kippur. It’s coming up in two weeks, right?” My conversation with Cedric was a true pleasure and I was genuinely sorry when our time was up. He gave me an affectionate hug before leaving the visitor’s room.

I’d like to tell you about another prisoner I met that day in Stateville – a 36 year old man named Addolfo Davis.

Addolfo grew up in an even more at-risk environment than Cedric. He was born to a single, drug-addicted mother who severely neglected him. Before he turned 10, Addolfo was running away from home and turning to local gangs for protection. He was just 9 the first time he robbed someone for money to buy food, which resulted in the first of many run-ins with the juvenile justice system.

Addolfo was eventually taken from his mother and placed under his grandmother’s care, where he lived in a one-room, dirt-floor cellar apartment, which already housed three other family members. Around this time, a DCFS social worker reported that he was becoming a danger to himself and strongly urged that he be placed in a contained foster home. Despite these recommendations, Addolfo was eventually removed from his grandmother and placed in a group home.

Addolfo’s incident occurred when he was barely 14. He and two older boys went to the apartment of a rival, reportedly to discuss a turf dispute. When they entered the apartment, the two older boys took out guns and shot four people, killing two. According to witness testimony, Addolfo was present but did not shoot a gun.

Later that day, the police apprehended Addolfo and interrogated him without an attorney present. The only person there to represent him was his mother, who was no longer his legal guardian and who later testified that she was intoxicated at the time. The interrogation ended with his signing a confession, though both his and his mother’s poor literacy skills likely prevented either of them from fully understanding what he had signed.

Although he was only a minor, a juvenile judge ruled that Addolfo’s case be transferred to adult court. This ruling was apparently influenced by the testimony of a therapist who cited his past criminal history and cast doubt on his ability to be rehabilitated by the time he reached the age of 21. In the end, 14 year old Addolfo was tried as an adult for felony murder and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

I was told that Addolfo Davis was small, traumatized eighty pound teenager at the time of his conviction. The Addolfo I met two weeks ago was a grounded and articulate man. I had the opportunity to be present when he spoke with his pro bono lawyer as they prepared his application for clemency from Governor Quinn, which is his only legal recourse now that his appeals have been exhausted. As they spoke, it became obvious that Addolfo had been spending a great of time in the prison’s law library. He clearly had a far reaching knowledge of the legal aspects of his case and of the complicated clemency process. At times, it actually seemed that he was advising his lawyer rather than the other way around.

My first question was to ask Addolfo how he found this obvious inner peace. His answer was utterly unexpected. He said that his first few years in prison were horrid. He was frightened and aggressive and spent much of his time fighting with other inmates and just trying to survive day by day. As a result he was sent to the Tamms Correctional Center – a so-called “super max” prison in Southern Illinois – where he would spend four and a half years.

As at most super max prisons, prisoners at Tamms are forced to live alone, 24 hours a day, close to seven days a week in 8 x 10 concrete cement cells that contain concrete beds, stainless steel sinks and toilets. Although each cell has a window, the windows cannot be opened, and the only way to look out of them is to stand on the bed. The doors to each cell are designed to completely isolate the prisoner inside his cell. When I did a little research, I discovered that when Tamms was first opened in 1998, the warden, George Welborn was quoted as saying “Tamms is not about rehabilitation, it’s about punishment.”

So you can imagine my amazement when Addolfo told me “For some people it’s the worst – but Tamms was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He explained that as a result of his stay there, he actually experienced real solitude and inner peace for the first time in his life. Whenever he felt himself growing claustrophobic, he taught himself how clear his mind and calm himself down. He also started writing and reading. The book “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch had a particularly strong spiritual impact upon him.

I asked Addolfo if he identified with any particular religious faith and he told me no. He said, “I believe in God with all my heart, but I don’t belong to any religion.” He said it all comes down to “love your neighbor,” adding that “God is a caring, forgiving God. God will straighten everything out in the end.”

Addolfo told me he read the Bible and the Koran every day, and that in prison he was learning the true meaning of spiritual struggle. Every day, he said, is a challenge for him to hold on to his humanity in an inhumane world. He quoted his grandmother: “When you turn yourself over to God, the devil works overtime to pull you back.”

Although he is very, very happy to be out of Tamms, Addolfo did say that it is much harder to find the same kind of solitude in Stateville. He said sometimes he’ll just put on his ear buds and listen to music, sometimes even just static, and he can get back to a focused, clear minded place.

As I did with Cedric, I asked Addolfo for his definition of forgiveness. He said that the first step in forgiveness was forgiving yourself so that you can take personal responsibility for your own actions. When he was in the solitude of Tamms, he said, he learned that once he forgave himself, he was able to forgive others more easily and not simply point the finger of blame. Once he quieted down his mind, he found forgiveness for his mother, realizing that her drug use was not her. He was then able to see past her actions to her inner humanity.

Addolfo also said to me that since he never had a childhood, he was learning how to be a kid. And more than anything, that meant learning how to love unconditionally. As he put it, his challenge is learning how to truly love someone who isn’t ready to take accountability yet. It is not a simple process, to be sure. His approach, he said, is: “I love you, I forgive you, but I’m gonna keep my distance. When you’re ready, I’m always here for you.” He makes a point of talking to everyone, even members of rival gangs, which is not considered a particularly advisable thing to do in prison.

Needless to say, most of the prisoners aren’t used to this sort of attitude from an fellow inmate – but Addolfo said he has found that when they get used to it, they eventually respond. That is essentially his struggle: learning how to live the faith of “love your neighbor” each and every day.

I’m telling you the stories of Cedric and Addolfo tonight for two reasons. The first is because I believe they are truly my spiritual teachers. Indeed, I believe they are spiritual teachers for us all. I say this with some hesitation – only because I do not in any way want to patronize them or over-romanticize their situation. Still, as we find ourselves in the midst of this season of forgiveness and reconciliation, I can’t help but wonder if there are countless spiritual teachers out there just like Cedric and Addolfo, locked far away from us, forgotten by everyone but their families.

This Yom Kippur, I’m thinking of Cedric’s letters to his mother, his brothers and his community – and his burning desire to bring honor back to his life and to those he loves. I’m thinking about Addolfo sitting alone in a cell in a super max prison, finding inner peace for the first time, and struggling to live up to the teaching “love your neighbor as yourself” in a place almost wholly devoid of anything resembling love.

Of course these spiritual lessons come at a huge price – to them and to us all. And that brings me to the second reason I’m telling you their stories. It’s because I sincerely wish to God they weren’t my spiritual teachers. They shouldn’t be. And if they are, then shame on us.

I don’t know any other way to say it: we live in a country that loves to lock people away. The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. We’ve locked up 2,000,000 people in our country. And to our further shame, 70% of these inmates, like Cedric and Addolfo, are people of color.

But our shame grows even deeper than this. Our country – the United States – is the only country in the world – in the world – that sentences children to life in prison without possibility of parole. Right now there are approximately 2,570 child offenders serving life without parole throughout the US. 99 of them are right here in Illinois. The total number in the rest of the world is zero.

The shame yet deepens: outside of the United States the practice of handing down juvenile life sentences has become so unthinkable, it is now illegal as a basic principle of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – which the US has still not ratified – prohibits life imprisonment of children. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice requires that imprisonment of children can only be imposed as a last resort and that it be limited to the shortest length of time necessary to protect society. And the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, requires that in sentencing children, states must “take account of their age and the desirability of promoting their rehabilitation.”

Now when it comes to innocence cases, I think we can all agree on the clear injustice that is being committed. No one condones imprisoning the innocent – least of all children. However, when it comes to locking children up, the injustice should be no less obvious to us. There is compelling evidence, for instance, to indicate that Cedric Cal is totally innocent of the crime of which he was convicted. But in a deeper sense, this is not and should not be the issue. The issue is that when we sentence children to life sentences for their crimes – even of murder – we as a society are essentially giving up on them..

It should come as no surprise that there is clear racial component to this shame. Here in Illinois, for instance, 82% of our imprisoned child offenders are people of color. And as my stories to you obviously indicate, there is an obvious socioeconomic component to consider as well. But again, on a deeper level, if we look deep into the heart of it, even this should not the basic issue. We simply should not be locking away our children and throwing away the key. When we lock children away without even the possibility of parole, we affirm that they are no longer our problem, that they simply do not matter to us any more. When we lock them away, we deem them irredeemable.

We say this even though we know there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Science has shown that teenagers are not yet completely formed, either physically or emotionally. Although children are able to grasp the concepts of “right” and “wrong” at a very young age, the nuances of weighing long term risks and benefits are lost on even late adolescents, making them more prone to take risks, more vulnerable to peer pressure, and less likely to understand the perspective of others or the consequences of their decisions.

We also know, through neurological research, that the brain does not fully develop until late adolescence, around or after the age of 18. Doctors have now provided a medical reason for the various behaviors identified as typical in adolescents: they are not capable of behaving like adults because they lack the developed brain structure to do so.

Psychological research also tells us that, it is precisely because their characters are not yet fully formed that children are uniquely susceptible to rehabilitation. It is reasonable to assume that given the chance, many child psychology experts say, even those young adults who commit the most serious crimes will be able to grow into mature and responsible adults.

The Torah has something quite interesting to say about society’s response to its “problem children.” It may not be what you’d expect. In Deuteronomy 21, we read the following:

If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town: “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon, the men of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)

It is, of course, a horrific passage. No other way to describe it or rationalize it. Interestingly enough, though, these notorious verses do manage to shine a harsh light into our deepest and darkest insecurities – on adult society’s latent fear that we might somehow, God forbid, “lose control” of our children. And on our temptation, as a result, to simply give up on them.

Taken to its furthest extreme, when we deem our children irredeemable, we ultimately treat them as somehow disposable. Now anyone who has ever parented an adolescent knows that there are those moments when we are tempted to go to these dark places. But of course we resist these impulses because we know it would simply be unthinkable – unthinkable – to give up on our children.

And yet that is just what we are doing to our children in this country. In 26 states – including the state of Illinois – we are locking our children away and telling them they will have to live the rest of their natural lives in prison. We are the only country in the world that locks away its children forever.

I know these aren’t easy issues to talk about. Violent crime and criminal justice are perhaps the most gut-wrenchingly painful issues there are. The violation that results from violence goes deep and lasts life long. But having compassion for victims does not an should not exclude our compassion for perpetrators. We can and we must hold them together, especially when it involves children. This is, after all, the very essence of reconciliation – a spiritual ideal we have been wrestling for the past eight days. How can we, how will we, dig deep and discover reservoirs of compassion for all?

I’m sharing Cedric and Addolfo’s stories with you tonight because I believe we have much to learn from them this Yom Kippur. They have a great deal to teach us about how we might live our lives – and the ways we should live as a society. On this night of our vows, we must vow to do better by them, and by all the “child offenders” that are locked away in prisons throughout our state and our country.

I’m asking you now to join me in being a voice of conscience on their behalf. On the table as you exit tonight, you will find flyers with more information on this issue and a checklist of very concrete actions you can take. On this night of our atonement, I can think of few deeds more worthy or sacred.

Before I end, I’d like to personally thank JRC member Sarah Silins, who works at Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center for inspiring my remarks to you tonight. She arranged my trip to Stateville, truly one of the most spiritually and politically challenging experiences of my recent memory. Like so many other JRC members, she has educated me deeply with her passion and her work for social justice. I know Sarah and JRC member Julie Biehl, who is the Director of the Children and Family Justice Center, are ready to speak to anyone in our congregation about these issues and would be delighted to share ideas with you on how you might be an advocate for this profoundly important – and largely unrecognized cause.

I’d like to end by reading a letter. I received it from Cedric just this week:

Salaam Alaikum (Peace be unto you)

Dear Rabbi Brant,

May this missive find you in good spirits and health. Thank you for coming to spend a moment in time with me, to hear some of my life story to share with your community. Thank you for acknowledging our humanity. For we who are incarcerated are human beings that lost our way who are trying to find our way back. As you celebrate Yom Kippur as an individual, community and a nation, I hope that the spirit that comes forth from such activity gives you a determination to serve the voiceless and disenfranchised who desire to reconcile with the community and become productive citizens.

For once one atones, he/she has entered into God’s mercy and is absolved from past sins and transgressions and is free from it never to be judged again. I was a rebellious youth who lacked knowledge and suffered great chastisement from Allah/God. I believe I have atoned to God but yet I’m still despised and rejected by society because of being convicted of a crime. What will be the atonement process of prisoners and society at large? What will wipe the slate clean like God does for the Jews after Yom Kippur?

How long shall a child be held responsible for these transgressions? I was a 17 year old boy but I am 36 years old now. As a child, I thought as a child – now that I am a man I put away childish things, so says the Scriptures. I never experienced manhood outside the confines of prison. I truly desire the opportunity to be a father, the opportunity of marriage and to have a wife and children. To vote in an election. To own property, have a bank account. All these little thiings we take for granted, some of us have never even experienced.

I humbly ask that you lift your voice to deliver youth from inhumane sentences. We are your children. A mistake or error should not, must not, define our lives. We are redeemable. We are the product of society’s neglect and degenerative culture. I have been ashamed, abased for being such a child. I’ve repeated and made the determination to never return to such past transgressions again. I need society to give me a chance to prove myself worthy to be accepted back into the community.

I hope your speech to the larger community takes on the spirit of forgiveness and mercy. Then the action of bringing your collective voices to change a law that is against the principles of atonement. It would be a great demonstration of your forgiveness of us who transgressed the community. And a great proof that God is Most Merciful of those who show mercy.

May Allah (God) bless us all with the light of understanding.

Sholom Aleykum,
Cedric Cal

US Global Command and Control System

In 2006, I was approached by JRC’s Peace Dialogue task force and asked if I would consider adding something to our Shabbat prayer for peace. Could we, they asked, introduce the prayer by reading the names of three American soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and three Afghan civilians who had been killed in these two ongoing wars?

The reason, they explained, was to remind ourselves that peace is not just an abstract concept. If we’re going to say a prayer for peace, we should own up to the stakes – we should acknowledge that we are citizens of nation at war, that war comes with a very real human cost, and that as American citizens, we are complicit in all actions made by our country.

So for the past five years, that’s how we’ve begun our prayer for peace every Shabbat evening: a JRC member will stand up and bring the names of real people into our sanctuary. Three will invariably be American teenagers or twenty somethings, followed by six Iraqis and Afghans with harder-to-pronouce Arabic names.

One year ago, when President Obama when announced a reduction of American combat forces in Iraq, I was tempted to finally stop reading the names of Iraqi civilians.  It felt to me as if the war effort was finally winding down and transitioning into a fundamentally different kind of operation. I was also eager to shine a brighter spotlight on our war in Afghanistan, which had officially become the longest war in American history, with no end in sight. (Yesterday, by the way, marked the tenth anniversary of that war – a milestone that managed to pass our nation by without much fanfare.)

I ran this idea past several Peace Dialogue members and got different kinds of responses, both pro and con. In the end, I was prevailed upon to continue. After all, Obama himself said that our active combat presence would be maintained until the end of 2011. And as long as this is the case, I realized, we’d be hard pressed to deny that we were still a nation at war.

As I think about my response to Obama’s announcement, I realize, somewhat shamefully, that I had fallen prey to a very convenient form of naivete.  Or at best, wishful thinking. Because the painful truth is that we going to be in Iraq well past even 2011.  The truth is no one really knows when our military is going to leave Iraq, but even when it does, there can be no doubt that we will remain an armed presence in that country for a very long time.

Our government actually makes no secret of the fact that we’re digging in.  All the signs are there, even if they are not widely reported by the media.  Most Americans don’t know, for instance, that the US mission in Baghdad is the world’s largest embassy – built on a tract of land the size of the Vatican and actually visible from space.  Why? Because after the military withdraws, the State Department expects to have 17,000 personnel in Iraq at some 15 sites. If those plans go as expected, 5,500 of them will be armed “security contractors.”  Of the remaining 11,500, most will be in support roles of one sort or another, with only a couple of hundred in traditional diplomatic jobs.

In short, when the military leaves, the US presence in Iraq will shift over to a heavily militarized State Department presence. But make no mistake: we’re in Iraq for the long haul.

And when it comes to our presence in Afghanistan, the news is even worse, I’m afraid. In 2009, President Obama said 2011 would be the “transition point” for bringing the troops home. One year ago, NATO announced that it would be moving the goalposts to 2014. Now just two months ago, we’ve learned that the US and Afghan governments are negotiating an agreement that will allow US military forces to remain in Afghanistan until 2024.

This, even though a new poll shows fewer Afghans than ever support a US presence in the country or believe we are making their country any safer. This, even though a CNN poll earlier this year revealed that 63% of Americans “completely oppose” this war.

The hard truth about all of this – the very hard truth – is that our nation is now essentially entrenched in a permanent state of war: war without end.  It is our new normal.

I find it all the more frightening when you consider the sheer magnitude of this “permanent war condition” – and how far its reach actually extends.  If are to truly gauge our military presence honestly, it does not end with Iraq and Afghanistan. Our nation is also engaged militarily in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  The Washington Post reported last year that US has deployed special operations forces in 75 countries, from South America to Central Asia. We are also expanding drone wars throughout the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.  And none of these “operations” show any sign of winding down. On the contrary, by all appearances we’re just getting started.

How did it all come to this? Well, students of US history can can surely chart a course leading from the earliest days of manifest destiny to our first overseas military adventures in the 19^th century, through World War I, World War II, the Cold War and now, the huge buildup in the aftermath of 9/11.  In each period of history, our military reach has extended greater and greater across the world. And in each period, our national mission – our sense of our place in the world – has slowly but fundamentally shifted.

It’s not quoted that widely any more, but George Washington, in his farewell address to the nation urged his country to cultivate its own garden and avoid foreign entanglements at all costs. That notion seem utterly quaint today, particularly in the post 9/11 world. Today, America is world’s only superpower – and such we are wielding that power with impunity literally all over the world.

Consider these facts:

- The Pentagon currently spends approximately $700 billion annually – more than the entire rest of the world combined.

- We have approximately 300,000 troops stationed abroad, again more than the rest of the world combined. According to the Department of Defense, we have 761 military bases in foreign countries around the world. (And that number might actually be higher than 1,000, depending on which report you choose to believe.)

- The Pentagon has literally divided up the planet, maintaining armed readiness under what it calls “Unified Commands.” Each command headed by a four-star general or admiral. The “Pacific Command,” which comprises 50% of the earth and more than half its population; the “Central Command” (namely the Greater Middle East); the “European Command,” which was established in Germany following World War II, the “African Command,” created in 2007, which conducts military activities and operations in 53 African countries; the “Southern Command,” which encompasses Central and South America and the Caribbean; the “Northern Command,” namely North America, established in the wake of 9/11; and finally, “Space Command,” responsible for the largest region of all.

While all this information is technically public domain, I wonder how many Americans really know these facts about their country. My suspicion is that we know just bits and pieces of the puzzle, but are simply too overwhelmed by the enormity of it all to contemplate it for very long.  And most of us who do think about it for a second longer generally throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s just the way of the geopolitical world.”

Of course it’s all well and good when we Americans say things like this. But rarely do we stop to consider how the facts I just listed for you are experienced by the rest of the world’s inhabitants.  I’ll put it plainly: while our pursuit of military entitlement around the world may help us feel safe here at home, it is fueling anti-American attitudes around the world. We know this. Every international poll tells us this in no uncertain terms. And yet the buildup continues.

And that really is the crux of the issue here. For some Americans the most salient lesson of 9/11 was that the world is a dangerous place and we must use military power to mitigate the danger.  I include myself among those who learned a very different lesson: 9/11 taught us that when we intervene militarily abroad, we beget blowback here at home.

Many of us had hope that Obama truly believed this as well – that he would turn back the Bush doctrine and steer our nation’s foreign policy toward a saner course. But as it has turned out, the very opposite has happened. He has embroiled us in even more Mideast wars and has deployed even larger numbers of special operations forces to that region.  He has also transferred or brokered the sale of substantial quantities of weapons to these countries and has continued to build and expand US military bases at an ever-increasing rate.

He also promised to prosecute the so-called “War on Terror” with greater attention to civil liberties, but that hope has been fairly dashed as well.  During his campaign, note what he had to say about this subject:

As president, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

Well, it’s over two years later and Guantanamo is still open. This past March, the Obama administration announced it would be resuming military tribunals there. And just last week, we learned that our President did something truly unprecedented – our President actually approved the extra-judicial assassination of an American citizen in Yemen.

Now I know there are many out there, including many liberal folk, who aren’t expressing over-concern about this incident. It is certainly true, Anwar al-Awlaki was a radical Muslim cleric, and yes, his language and speeches were incendiary. He may even have plotted against the United States – but we will never know that for sure because he was never indicted for a crime. What we do know is that Yemen experts said he was a minor player – and that he likely had no operational connection to Al Qaeda. But again, we’ll never know that for sure. What we do know is that Mideast extremists now have a new martyr and we have crossed a terrifying Rubicon: our government now openly assassinates its own citizens without due process.

I’m focusing these observations exclusively on our Commander-in-Chief, but of course I realize that this issue is much, much larger than just one man.  I know it’s natural to look to our primarily to our President, but in truth what we call “Washington” is really a massive bureaucracy that includes a myriad of interests. It’s a far reaching power elite that includes not only the federal government but the national security state, as well as the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. It also includes big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors, major corporations and any number of lawyers, lobbyists former officials, and retired military officers, all of whom hold enormous influence over our foreign policy.

This, in short, is what empire looks like in the 21^st century. It may differ from empires past, but if you have any doubt, just take a look around: just like all empires, our nation has has positioned itself to fight war without end, and like all empires, we’re starting to buckle here at home under the weight of our own power and ambition.

As I’m fond of pointing out, we Jews actually know quite a bit about empires. Whether it was the Babylonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, we’ve experienced them directly over the centuries. We’ve lived among them, we’ve been oppressed by many of them, but most critically, we’ve seen many a mighty empire rise and fall throughout our history.

As a Jew, I’ve always been enormously proud of the classic rabbinical response to empire. The Jewish people have been able to survive even under such large and mighty powers because we’ve clung to a singular sacred vision.  That there is a power even greater. Greater than Pharaoh, greater than Babylon, even greater than the Roman empire that exiled us and dispersed our people throughout the diaspora. It is a quintessentially Jewish vision best summed up by the venerable line from the book of Zechariah: “Lo b’chayil v’lo b’koach” – “Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.”

Indeed, the Prophets give us a powerful paradigm for understanding these kinds of issues.  In the Hebrew Bible, we read that after the Israelites enter the land, they eventually come to the prophet Samuel and tell him they want a king – to be “k’chol ha’goyim – like all the other nations.” God considers this to be a personal rejection, but tells Samuel to tell the nation, essentially, “Fine if you want a King, I’ll give you a King. But just you wait and see what happens.”

Of course as they come to discover, kingship in Ancient Israel doesn’t go so well for the nation. It becomes focused on militarism, becomes incorrigibly corrupt, splits in two and eventually gets overrun from within and without. During this period, it is only the prophets who speak the hard truth to power, who rail against the toxic ambitions of Israelite empire, who warn that this path will eventually be their downfall. And so it becomes.

Given all this, it would seem to me that as American Jews, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Because for the first time in our history we find ourselves, by and large, as the beneficiaries of empire.  Even more than that, I’d say we American Jews have firmly hitched our wagon to it.  The state of Israel represents our major military proxy in the Middle East and the American Jewish establishment is very well enmeshed in the political power elite of our country.  There is no getting around it, at the dawn of the 21^st century, Jews have firmly cast our lot with empire.

But it’s certainly worth asking: in doing so have made a kind of Faustian bargain? Are we bucking the most central lesson of our survival over the centuries?  We more than most, should understand the limits and dangers of nations that venerate unmitigated power. After all, aren’t we quite literally living proof of this fact? We know full well that although mighty empires will rise, it is not by might and not by power that they will be sustained.

If this is so – if this is truly so – then we of all people should be helping lead the charge for a new direction.  We should be proclaiming the lessons of our own historical experience for all to hear. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen what happens to powerful nations that depend exclusively upon military might to make them strong. We know what happens to countries that neglect the needs of their own citizens while pouring more and more blood and treasure into foreign wars. We know that when nations attack and occupy other nations, it doesn’t make them more secure. It only isolates them further, creating more enemies than allies in the end.

I know that many feel it is hopelessly naive to say these kinds of things.  Those who challenge the status quo of permanent war today are dismissed as out of touch, over-idealistic or just plain oddball. Anti-war activists are generally treated by the political establishment – by liberals and conservatives alike – with condescension, if not downright contempt. We just don’t understand the way the “real world” works. The real world is a “dangerous place.”  In the real world, things get messy.

But I can’t help but think that as things get messier for us here at home, we might actually start to see a change in this mindset. When it comes to our various wars, the middle class has gotten something of a free ride up until now. The government has gone to great lengths to ensure that we don’t feel the pain of permanent war. We’ve instituted a poverty draft where only half a percent of Americans actually serve in the military. We are outsourcing military service more and more to private security contractors – and are increasingly using drone technology to fight our battles, so that no matter how much violence we mete out, our citizenry experiences war as little more than a video game. All of this has served to anesthetize us. The reality of war is just not that real to most Americans.

But it may get real before too long. As these wars continue to draw out with no end in sight, with no discernible progress – and as economic hardship starts to affect more and more of the middle class – growing numbers of Americans may well start to connect the dots.  The Occupy Wall Street protests forming around the country may represent an early indication of this – the nascent stirrings of a new movement that finally challenges the culture of empire that has been gripping our nation.   If not now, however, it will come. It will come because we are, quite simply, on an unsustainable course. At the end of the day, there really is no such thing as war without end. Sooner or later, something has to give. It is only a matter of  when – and how.

In the meantime, I believe the most important thing we can do is to educate ourselves. To learn, as Americans, the truth about the wars our nation is fighting. To understand the suffering it inflicts on others. To grasp the costs we are paying ourselves here at home in so many unacceptable ways.

And I hope that as Jews, we might at least be able to have this conversation: as citizens of a nation engaged in war without end, how seriously will we honor a spiritual tradition that demands we pursue peace at all costs?  How seriously will we heed a historical legacy that has witnessed all too well the price of empire?  Is this really the kind of Jewish voice, Jewish vision, we want to hand over to the next generation? Or do we want to reclaim our prophetic voice and vision – one that speaks truth to power and points out the hard lessons of history?

All good questions for Yom Kippur.  This is, after all, the season in which we are commanded to ask hard questions together as a community. As American Jews, it seems to me, as members of two communities, we do this twice over.  As Americans, as Jews, how are we betraying the values we hold dear? As Americans, as Jews, how are we accommodating ourselves to a life of war without end? Are we really, truly prepared to bear the consequences of our acquiescence?

This year, let us pursue peace.

Source: Economic Policy Institute, The State of Working America 2011

Three years ago, I traveled with several JRC members and nearly 1,500 others to Postville, Iowa. We went to show our solidarity with 400 immigrant workers of the Agriprocessor kosher meat packing plant who had recently been arrested and imprisoned. It was, at the time, the largest single-site workplace raid in US history.

After participating in an interfaith service, we marched through the streets of Postville. As we reached the downtown area, we met up with angry counter-protestors, many of whom were holding signs condemning the invasion of “illegal immigrants” into their communities. One woman held a large sign that still sticks in my mind – it read: “What Would Jesus Do? Obey the Law.” I distinctly remember pointing out the irony of this sign to a fellow marcher, considering Jesus is actually considered to be one of the earliest practitioners of civil disobedience.

Now, I certainly don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong when people of faith invoke religion to support their political positions.  From the prophets to Martin Luther King, faith has played a powerful and important role inspiring movements of political transformation.

But on that day in Postville, I was reminded that religion generally works best as a force for social good when it is leveraged on behalf of the the vulnerable and the oppressed.  But when those in power use faith as a justification for their oppression of the weak – frankly, that’s when we tend to witness religion at its worst.

To put it in the most basic terms, I’d say religion and politics mix well when they are used for the purposes of liberation. When they are used on behalf of empire – when they are wielded in what my Christian colleagues might call a “Constantinian” fashion – religion and politics generally tend to make for a pretty fatal mixture.

That’s why I reacted so instinctively when I saw that sign in Postville. “What Would Jesus Do? Obey the Law.” Really?  Even if those laws are oppressive?  Even if those laws are enacted by an all-powerful empire and wielded as a weapon against the weak?  Now I’m not a Christian theologian, but I was always led to believe this was exactly the kind of thing that used to drive Jesus nuts.

However you might choose to read your Bible, this much is fairly clear to me: if our religious tradition teaches us anything useful at all about laws, it’s that we need them to safeguard the well-being of the poor, the stranger, the widow the orphan. For their sake and ours, we are obliged to use the rule of law on behalf of the weakest – to protect those who are most at risk in our community.

I mention this because I strongly believe there has been a growing backlash against these kinds of laws in our country over the past few decades.  Government’s role in creating a stable foundation for the most vulnerable is currently under vicious political attack. And I’m very sad to see this political backlash supported by growing religious rhetoric.

Indeed, politicians, clergy and pundits, are increasingly invoking God when they attack the role of government. They preach that the real evil in our midst is “Big Government,” that higher taxes are immoral. The mere suggestion that society has a responsibility to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth  – well, this simply represents secular, godless (or God forbid) “socialist” values.

Now that the 2012 campaign is gearing up, this religious rhetoric is entering our political discourse in some pretty surreal ways. Recently, for example, Michelle Bachmann responded to Hurricane Irene by saying it was God’s warning to Washington to rein in taxes and runaway spending.  And not long ago. Texas governor Rick Perry gave an ersatz Dvar Torah in which he compared the government to Pharaoh, claiming that we’ve all “become slaves to the government.”

One of the most popular financial gurus in the country, a Christian fundamentalist named Dave Ramsey, preaches the same sort of gospel.  His signature advice to his followers is to handle money “God’s way.” What would it mean for our country to run its economy “God’s way?” According to Ramsey, God’s ways would not include Social Security, since God would not want to invest for the long-term at such a modest rate of return. God’s ways also don’t include progressive taxation, since God desires us to emulate the habits of the wealthy. And God’s ways certainly do not mean creating government programs to protect the vulnerable, since God commands people to help themselves.

Now I know we’re tempted to chuckle when we hear this kind of stuff. But lest you think these views only reflect the feelings of a radical few, you should know that these kinds of religious ideas are finding traction – and they are growing increasingly popular.  According to a just-released study by Baylor University,  approximately one in five Americans believe that God opposes government regulation and champions the free market.  As one researcher put it, there is a significant demographic that actually believes “the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work.”

There are so many things that trouble me about these kinds of religious ideas – but I think what troubles me the most is their inherent moral insensitivity. For me, saying “God helps those who help themselves” is just a theological version of “the poor and the hungry will just have to fend for themselves.”

So I’ll go out on a limb here and say that big government is not our enemy. On the contrary, I’d say it is our central religious imperative.  In fact, I think that those who bash big government have got it backward.  The real religious issue here is not that our government is oppressing American citizens or that we need to minimize its role in our lives.

No, if there is one critical religious and moral concern facing our national community – the concern that frankly we should be shouting from the rooftops – it’s that the US, the wealthiest nation in the world, has the greatest wealth inequity of any Western industrialized nation.  It’s that the top 1 percent of the households in our country hold 40 percent of our country’s wealth.  It’s that government as enacted laws that enable the rich to get richer while the laws that protect the poor are slowly but surely being dismantled.

Along these lines, I’d add that our religious concern should be aroused by the fact that the number of people currently living below the poverty line is almost 47 million – the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau. Or the fact that in the world’s wealthiest nation, one in four children under the age of six live in poverty. That 33 million adults and 17.2 million children live in food insecure households.  And of course,  it’s the fact that these numbers all across the board are significantly higher for people of color.

Now, I know there are many in the religious community who do share these concerns and who work tirelessly to alleviate them.  People of faith make up a large percentage of those in the trenches – and they know better than anyone the real spiritual concerns facing poor and middle class Americans today.

But for too many reasons, these concerns have not been politically mobilized. They are being drowned out by a louder religious voice in our political culture – one that attacks the role of government and insists that the best way we can help the poor and the unemployed is to insist, in essence, that “God will provide.”

And that’s a real shame, because one of the ethical  glories of Biblical tradition – a tradition that is shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike – are the myriad of commandments that demand society distribute its wealth equitably – so that the most vulnerable among us may never slip through the cracks.

So, my friends, it’s time for a little Torah study. I’d like to try something that in today’s cultural climate might be considered sacrilegious. I’d like to make the religious case for big government.

Let’s start with Deuteronomy 15:11 – one of the Torah’s most famous teachings on economic justice:

The poor will never cease from the land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.

At the heart of this commandment is a profound challenge. For whatever reason, the world is a broken place. Economic inequity will forever be a constant for society – and so we are told we must never accommodate it at face value.  We are bidden to take responsibility for the poor in our midst and consistently do what we must to alleviate their burdens because they will always be among us.

It’s also interesting that the commandment “open your hand to the poor” is written in the singular – like most of the laws in Deuteronomy.  As such, it commands each and every one of us, as individuals, to honor the value of tzedakah.

But at the same time, God commands these laws to the nation as a whole. Economic justice is at once an individual and a collective responsibility. In other words, individual charity is desired and important, but it is not enough. At the end of the day, the Bible views the creation of economic equity as a communal obligation as well.

Another famous example of this comes in the book of Leviticus, where the Israelites are subjected to what might be called significant “government regulation.” Indeed, those who use religion to bash big government might be surprised to discover that the Bible contains a commandment that all Israelite farmers must leave the corners of their fields unharvested so the poor and the stranger may glean from them. And they’d probably be appalled to learn that every fiftieth year, on the Jubilee Year, all land reverts back to its original owners and all debts are automatically forgiven.

And when it comes to taxes, the Bible makes no bones about it: “thou shalt pay.” Far from being a necessary evil, paying tax is viewed as a sacred obligation. Examples of taxes abound in the Torah: the Israelites are commanded to pay a 10% tithe for the poor, a tithe for the Levites, offerings for the priests and a flat shekel tax for communal sacrifices.

Neither does this kind of anti-government, anti-tax mentality exist in any meaningful way in Jewish tradition itself.  On the contrary, in a classic line from Pirke Avot (3:2), Rabbi Hanina teaches,

Pray for the well-being of the government; for were it not for fear of it, each person would swallow the other alive.

Jewish law has little specific to say about the government redistribution of wealth, since when halachah developed Jews were living exclusively under the rule of foreign governments.  However, the Rabbis made a point of ruling that Jews are obligated to pay taxes imposed by the governments under which they lived unless they were patently unjust. The ruling stems from the famous Talmudic principle, “Dina d’malkhuta dina.” (Bava Kamma 113a)  Literally, “the law of the land is the law.”

In general, the rabbis created a system in which the rule of law ensured a society of equity and economic justice.  This is not to say they advocate “class warfare” (to use a term being bandied about a lot these days). Equity means ensuring the protection at of the weak, without compromising the welfare of the strong. In her book “There Shall Be No Needy,” my colleague and friend Rabbi Jill Jacobs, sums this idea up well:

(Jewish Law) aims to mitigate inequity so as to prevent one person from exploiting or degrading another. It tends to favor and protect the more vulnerable party, while still looking out for the well-being of the more powerful one. Thus the law prevents selling needed medicines for more than the going rate, while also allowing doctors to accept money for their work; permits workers to leave in the middle of the day, while also limiting this permission when the labor market is tight and the crops are in danger of spoiling; and prevents a landlord from evicting a tenant suddenly, while also allowing the lease to be broken if the landlord loses his or her own home. When the balance tilts too far to one side, the principle of tikkun olam (in its earliest rabbinic manifestation) allows for adjustments to the legal system such that society functions more equitably.

These religious values express a certain essential world view about society and human nature.  At the end of the day, we’re being taught that issues of human poverty and wealth imbalance are too massive – and the stakes simply too high – to be left to individual noblesse oblige.  We are taught to never assume that left to their own devices, those who have will naturally take care of those who don’t.  And it’s downright dangerous to claim that God, working through the divine machinations of the free market, will somehow provide.

This does not mean that markets are bad or that they are immoral. Markets are by nature amoral – sometimes the results of market processes are good and sometime they are bad. That’s why it’s morally dangerous to rely on markets to protect the public good. While markets are incredibly useful and productive institutions, they are only moral insofar as they are structured to act morally. And that’s why we need government as a way to pursue our moral goals – so that we can do the right thing when the market fails to do so.

Past experience has shown us that corporations will not always provide safe working conditions or livable wages, that mortgage brokers will not voluntarily regulate themselves from predatory lending, that private schools cannot ensure that all our children get a decent education, that companies will not clean up their pollution on their own, and that “let the buyer beware” is not going to protect us from dangerous products. No, if we want to real social and economic equity in our country, we must acknowledge – in fact we must champion – the role of government in our national community.

Some might be surprised to know that one of the most eloquent American religious advocates of this point was none other than Dr. Martin Luther King. Most Americans view King primarily as a civil rights leader – but in fact at the end of his life, he was very outspoken against economic injustices in our nation. King wrote and spoke widely against the United States’ economic system for creating a widening gap between the rich and the poor.

To his credit, King understood that racial injustice could not be divorced from the deeper issue of socio-economic justice. To this end he publicly advocated a variety of government programs, including the creation of jobs by government and the institution of a guaranteed annual minimal income.

Of course, today our nation venerates King virtually on the level of a founding father. But as we prepare to unveil the new Martin Luther King memorial in Washington DC, I wonder what King would say about the state of economic justice in our country today. What he would say if he knew that this $120 million monument that was paid for largely through corporate donations – the largest being $10 million from General Motors, which now uses the King memorial in its car commercials?

As our nation celebrates Dr. King’s memory next month, do you think we’ll be prepared to honor his full legacy? To remind ourselves that he spoke passionately about the poor and working men and women, that he urged our government to create new programs and to guarantee a livable income for all American citizens?  And that these values came directly from his Biblically-inspired religious faith?

Now I am not saying that saying we should look to the government to be the answer to all of our problems. Of course a bureaucracy as large as the federal government is bound to be inefficient and wasteful in too many ways. But at the same time, I’d say it’s prejudiced in the extreme to cite inefficiency in order to question an essential function of government itself.

I’m also struck that those who rail against “big government” tend to use this term very, very selectively.  We rarely hear them use this claim, for instance, in reference to hundreds of billions of dollars our government allocates for defense spending – which include the maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons all over the world and the funding of two never-ending wars that a majority Americans believe we should not even be fighting at all.  We rarely hear “big government” directed toward federal laws passed in order to give significant tax breaks to the richest citizens in our country. And we certainly don’t hear conservative politicians and pundits refer to laws that outlaw abortion rights or same sex marriage as “big government.”

No, like everything else in politics, this term is a convenient euphemism. Underneath the slogan, I believe there lies an ideology of radical individualism – a value system that views social safety nets with disdain and believes that wealth will naturally trickle down from the wealthy to the rest of society.

But it’s just not working that way.  The “trickle-downers” tell us that the best way to create jobs and jump start the economy is to get government off the backs of business. For me, the most compelling argument against this theory is to simply take a look around. We’ve had more than three decades of government deregulation and what do we have to show for it? A steadily rising gap between the rich and poor, an increasingly squeezed middle class and ominously rising unemployment.  It’s simply not working.

We’re currently witnessing some encouraging signs that our administration is ready to take on this fight. Last week, Obama unveiled a deficit reduction plan that proposed $1.5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and Americans earning over $250,000 a year. And thanks to the support of Warren Buffet, it also includes a tax on the super-rich.  And sure enough, already the mere suggestion that the rich should pay their fair share is getting slammed by many politicians and pundits as “class warfare.”

Class warfare. It takes some chutzpah to claim that in a nation where the top 1% hold 40% of the wealth, a modest little deficit reduction plan can be called “class warfare.” And anyhow, what’s wrong with a little class warfare?  When the Torah demands that society actively redistribute its wealth, isn’t that class warfare? Don’t we gather around the seder table every year to celebrate what is, after all, class warfare?  When it comes right down to it, isn’t economic justice worth fighting for?

For me, one of the ironies of all this is that while I do believe government has a role to play in ensuring equity, I’m not all that confident that our elected leaders will be the ones to lead the way to this kind of reform. I think one of the hardest lessons of these past two years was that so many of us were inspired by the Obama campaign to believe in the power of the government to effect real social change – only to have these hopes dashed as mere illusions.

To put it bluntly – when it comes to the work of social change, I think we’re placing far too much faith in our political leaders and far too little on ourselves.  I’ll return to what I said at the outset: religion works best as a force for social good when it is invoked on behalf of the the vulnerable and the oppressed – when it speaks truth to power in order to shift power.  Politicians to the left and to the right – no matter how inspiring they may be – are part of the power elite in this country. Who will hold them to account if we do not?

That is what religion at its best has always done – and that is what the faith community desperately needs to do today.  We in the interfaith community share a venerable religious vision that speaks directly to the crises of this country. It’s a religious vision that understands the world is a broken place and that it doesn’t get fixed by itself. A vision that disavows the simplistic faith that “God will provide” and is rooted in the conviction that society can never take the welfare of its weakest citizens for granted.

And we shouldn’t take times such as these for granted.  Alas, we know all too well that these are not merely theoretical issues for any of us.  We all know people who are suffering heartbreaking losses as a result of this horrid economy. There are members of our own congregation – people who are in this sanctuary as I speak to you who have lost their jobs, who have lost their savings, lost their homes.

Many of us are just not used to thinking of ourselves as vulnerable – but as the middle class slowly shrinks in our country, we’re coming to grips with a truly painful reality. That our lives may never really have been on such firm ground after all.  That our children are growing up in a world that is more fragile than we might ever have dreamed.

I know we are all doing what we can to reach out to those in our community who need our support now more than ever. It is times such as these that challenge us to access our highest selves.  But at the same time, I do believe that modern democratic government and its programs are also a reflection of our best selves – our most decent selves.

And if this is truly so, then attempts to drastically cut taxes and shrink the public sector can only serve to diminish our ability to act as responsible moral beings. The more we Americans buy into a vision of government as bad, the more we stand by as this institution is weakened, the more we weaken our ability to redeem our world.

I know you all join me in my prayer that this be a better year – a year of dignity and prosperity for all. For us, for our loved ones, for those we don’t know personally but whose humanity is ours and for whose welfare we are ultimately responsible.

May we do what we can, what we must to create a fair and equitable world in our day – and may we bequeath future of genuine hope to our children.

Amen.

For matter how painful the prospect, I don’t think we can afford to dodge this question. If we agree that the inequitable distribution of power and privilege is a critical problem for us and for our world, then there will inevitably be times in which we are faced with an intensely difficult question: does tribal loyalty trump solidarity with the oppressed?

Actually, I’m coming to believe that this is not the best way to frame the question. I don’t really think it’s all that helpful to view this issue as some kind of zero-sum game; to see it as a question of tribal allegiance; to insist that I either stand with my own people or I don’t. I prefer to say it this way: that it is in my self interest as a Jew to stand in solidarity with the oppressed because I believe that Jews cannot be fully human while they benefit from a system that denies others their own humanity. For those with power and privilege, the struggle against racism and oppression is fought knowing that our own liberation is also at stake.

Click below to read the entire sermon:

What’s the difference between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? There are many different ways to answer that question. Some see the Jewish New Year as a celebration of rebirth – and Yom Kippur as the day we do the work that helps us enter the new year reborn anew. Others hear the shofar of Rosh Hashanah as a spiritual wake up call and Yom Kippur as a time to arise from our slumber and return to the path from which we’ve strayed.

I’ve been increasingly coming to understand these two festivals in a different way: Rosh Hashanah is that day we focus on Malchuyot – God’s sovereignty. On Rosh Hashanah we acknowledge a Power greater than own and honestly face the limits of our own power. On Yom Kippur, we look seriously at how we use our power. We ask ourselves: in what ways has our power corrupted us? In what ways have we wielded our power destructively? And most important: what can we do – what must we do – to transform our power from a corrupting force into power that might transform our world?

In thinking about this particular theme this Yom Kippur, I’ve find myself getting drawn back to a deeper and more inexorable issue – that is, namely the ways in which we are all part of a system of power and privilege. And I’m increasingly coming to realize that we can’t really analyze our own power without recognizing the underlying structures of power imbalance that are so indelibly imprinted in our world.

We all naturally want power to be used for the good and the benefit for all. We all believe racism and sexism and homophobia to be oppressive. These aren’t particularly controversial claims. But beyond our good intentions and our well-intentioned actions, I can’t help but ponder how so many of us take our own power and privilege for granted. How we use and abuse power in ways we can’t even begin to grasp.

So if Yom Kippur is indeed the time for us to think honestly about the ways we wield our power, I’d like to take a little bit of time today to explore this issue more deeply. I’d like to examine how structures of power affects each and every one of us; how they influence our thoughts and how they determine our actions. I’d like to unpack how privilege affects our lives in so many fundamental ways. And in particular, I’d like to look carefully at how these complex inform and define us as Jews.

When defining the meaning of privilege, the first thing we need to consider is that it is always found in relationship with another. When I use the word “privilege” in this way, I refer to the benefits one party gains at the expense of another. Moreover, many of these benefits are by definition unearned.

Let’s us me as an example, I am white, male, heterosexual and born into an upper middle-class family. Every one of these factors afford me a myriad of unearned benefits that are simply unavailable to others in my community with whom I am in relationship either directly or indirectly.

The other important thing about privilege is that it is almost always invisible and unseen to the privileged party. I would daresay even those of us among the privileged who consider ourselves to be generally sensitive, enlightened and progressive people have no clue about the ways we take our privilege for granted.

To use but one example, here are some of the benefits that automatically accrue to me for the simple fact of my being a heterosexual:

The state automatically gives me the right to get married, along with the tangible benefits and protections that come with it. As a straight person, I will never experience prejudice directed toward me due to my sexual orientation; I don’t have to fear being estranged from my family because of my heterosexuality; I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my sexual orientation won’t work against me; I can be open about my heterosexuality without worrying about my job; I can walk in public with my significant other and not have people stare or possibly harass me.

Even though I intellectually understand these privileges, I must confess they are largely invisible to me on a day to day basis. That’s why in the end, the idea of privilege is bigger than just a list of unearned benefits. It’s critically important for us to grasp how these privileges affect our daily lives, our careers, our education. In what ways do we benefit from a myriad of unearned privileges without ever even realizing it?

All made more complicated because we are all essentially made up of multiple identities. Since our identities intersect, there is not necessarily always a one to one correspondence between advantage and disadvantage. For example, if someone is poor but is also white they may not have class privilege, but as a white person, it is likely that this person will have an easier time of it than a person of color with the same income level. To one extent or another, we are all advantaged and disadvantaged at the same time. Having said this, however, it cannot be denied that there are those, in sum total, who enjoy significant unearned advantage over others.

For Jews as a group it is even more complicated. I would suggest that overall, our identity is predicated on disadvantage and the experience of oppression. After all, our most central sacred narratives occur in the context of powerlessness. “Avadim hayinu – we were slaves.” We were exiled from our land following quintessential tragedy of our people: the churban – the destruction of the Temple. These are more than just stories: they go to the heart of our collective self image. These narratives form the very DNA of our sacred traditions and rituals.

Moreover, the resonance of our historical experience – the tragic legacy of anti-semitism that culminated in the Holocaust– affects us no less deeply. I once said in a sermon several years ago that to be Jewish post-Holocaust means to live with collective PTSD – and indeed, it’s a condition that affects our identity and our relation to the world in so many profound ways.

At the same time, however, I believe this legacy of powerlessness is largely at odds with our contemporary reality. Quite frankly, the truth is that right now it’s actually a pretty good time to be Jewish. Although we’re often loathe to admit it, collectively speaking we currently enjoy a level of security, power and privilege at levels almost unprecedented in Jewish history.

Here in America, we’ve succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We constitute one of the most educated, economically secure and politically organized minorities in the country. Given the relatively small percentage of Jews in the US, we’re inordinately well represented in the corporate, academic, political and professional worlds. Anti-semitism has long ceased to be a meaningful impediment to Jewish advancement. It is difficult, if not impossible, to claim that being Jewish is in any significant way a liability in the United States of America today.

Now I’m sure many might argue that our empowerment in this country is not completely unearned, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. Like many other ethnic minorities that immigrated to the US, much of what the Jewish community has accomplished has been the result of hard work and very real sacrifice. But at the same time, we cannot deny that by and large, those who have since been born into the Jewish community are firmly a part of this country’s power structure – and as such we enjoy many of the benefits and privileges that come with that power. And at the very least we should serious thought to what this privilege is doing to our communal priorities and our relationship to other communities around us.

I’ve sometimes joke semi-facetiously that one of the cardinal sins of being Jewish is to admit that we actually have power. After all, for so long our very identity has been rooted in our powerlessness. Take that away from us and what are we left with? And further: if we’re now part of the majority power structure, could that possibly mean that we have now become our own worst nightmare – namely, God forbid, that we are now on the side of the oppressor?

Here’s a telling historical anecdote: back in the late 1960s there was growing tension in Black-Jewish relations. As Jews joined the white flight from urban centers to the suburbs and the Black Power movement began to grow, the coalition that had been built and nurtured in the Civil Rights movement was rapidly breaking down. Many Jews felt betrayed by what they experienced as anti-semitism from former allies. And many blacks felt that Jews had now become a part of the a racist white power structure that was at the root of their oppression.

It was around this time that James Baldwin wrote a famous essay entitled “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White.” When I first read this essay many years ago it had a powerful effect upon me – and over the years I’ve found myself returning to his challenging words again and again.

This is what he wrote:

In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man – for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.

For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.

This is what I take from these words: in many ways, to be a Jew today means to live with a kind of bifurcated identity. We continue to be shaped by our memories of past powerlessness, but as Baldwin correctly pointed out, in America we benefit in so many ways from the privileges that come with power. For my part, I’ve come to believe that it is politically and morally disingenuous of us to keep playing both sides of that card. As Jews, we would do well to ask: can we, should we honestly have it both ways?

In my opinion, this cognitive dissonance represents a critical challenge for the Jewish community in the 21^st century America. We currently enjoy unprecedented Jewish power and privilege. How will we choose to wield it?

Speaking for myself I’m increasingly coming to believe that it’s my obligation to recognize our power and privilege for what it truly is. To identify the ways that Jewish power privileges us in this country. I also believe that if we do this with frankness and honesty, then it becomes our responsibility to use our privilege to shift power in a more just and equitable direction.

How do we do this? For me, the answer is relatively straightforward: to stand in solidarity, as Jews, with all who are oppressed.

Now I realize this answer is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. In the first place, when the privileged and powerful decide to stand in solidarity with those with less power we make choices that are counter intuitive – choices that might not be of direct benefit to our own self-interest.

Here is one example. Many of you know, I’m sure, that I’ve become increasingly involved in the issue of immigrant justice. One day, about two years ago in which I was asked to offer a blessing at an interfaith vigil in solidarity with undocumented immigrants slated for deportation. As I stood waiting to speak, I was chatting with a priest who served a predominantly Latino parish. At one point he said something to the effect of, “What are you doing here?”

Or at least that was how I remember hearing his comment. I know he meant it as a compliment – but I also experienced his remark as a way of pointing out that unlike the Latino community, the Jewish community is not directly affected by this issue. I admit that when he said that comment, there was part of me that asked myself, “well, why am I here?” Is it out of middle class liberal guilt? Is it out of nostalgia? Is it because as a Jew, I’m seeking props from other ethnic communities?

But in the end, I reminded myself that no, I’m here because as a Jewish American, I’m the grandson of immigrants myself. I’m here because as a Jew, the struggle for immigrant justice benefited my own family and my own people at not long ago and that “there but for the grace of God.” And that while I might be tempted to say, “well this is not really my issue any more,” now that I have power and privilege in this country, I have an obligation to use it justly. And the primary way I can do this is to stand unabashedly in solidarity with those who do not share my privilege.

There can be no doubt that for Jews, I there will be times in which the prospect of solidarity work challenges us to our very core. Times which may force us to wrestle with own sense of tribal loyalty and allegiance. These are the times, indeed, in which we might have to consider whether or not we have actually, God forbid, become oppressors ourselves.

Still, I’m finding that solidarity work is becoming more and more important to my own spiritual vision as a Jew and as as a rabbi. It has come to inform much of the work I do in the greater community, from immigrant justice to worker justice to standing in solidarity with Palestinians. I know this latter issue in particular is enormously challenging for many – and in truth, it is for me as well. I’m well aware that the prospect of Palestinian solidarity work presents a profound challenge to the Jewish community. Nevertheless I will continue to try, in some small way, to put the difficult issues of Israeli power and privilege onto the Jewish radar screen. I also hope at least it might challenge us to have honest conversations about these issues as painful as they are.

For matter how painful the prospect, I don’t think we can afford to dodge this question. If we agree that the inequitable distribution of power and privilege is a critical problem for us and for our world, then there will inevitably be times in which we are faced with an intensely difficult question: does tribal loyalty trump solidarity with the oppressed?

Actually, I’m coming to believe that this is not the best way to frame the question. I don’t really think it’s all that helpful to view this issue as some kind of zero-sum game; to see it as a question of tribal allegiance; to insist that I either stand with my own people or I don’t. I prefer to say it this way: that it is in my self interest as a Jew to stand in solidarity with the oppressed because I believe that Jews cannot be fully human while they benefit from a system that denies others their own humanity. For those with power and privilege, the struggle against racism and oppression is fought knowing that our own liberation is also at stake.

Although these are indeed complex issues, I’ll return to what I said earlier: in another sense it is ultimately quite straightforward. After all, what is the lesson of our most central and oft-repeated Jewish narrative? God freed us from Egyptian bondage in order to show us, to show the Egyptians and to show the world that there is a power, yes, even greater than our own human power.

God then brought us into the wilderness and invited us to construct a new form of community – a society that would be, in a sense, the polar opposite of Egypt. A community where power was wielded with justice and compassion, where the well-being of its most powerless members – the stranger, the widow and the orphan – were ensured.

If we do indeed believe these to be among the most sacred teachings of our tradition, then our community is facing a challenge of truly daunting proportions. If this is our mission, then we owe it to ourselves to face up to the choices no matter how difficult or painful. It is certainly natural to seek the path of least resistance, the way of lesser tension. But as we know from our own lives and from our history, this is not the way to true transformation. In the end, power does not give an inch without a struggle.

This Yom Kippur, let us face up to the struggle together.

Amen.

And as I think about it, perhaps this is why we read a Martyrology on Yom Kippur. As we remember our martyrs, we search our own souls and ask ourselves honestly: what have we done in the past year to prove ourselves worthy of these profound sacrifices? What have we done to affirm that these people did not die in vain? Did we indeed honor their memories by transforming loss into justice and hope for our world?

Click below to read the entire sermon:

A JRC member recently asked why we never do the Martyrology service on Yom Kippur. I wrote back to the congregant – and I’ll confess to you now: I’ve never been a huge fan of this particular liturgy.

The Martyrology, known as “Eleh Ezkarah” in Hebrew, is traditionally recited during the Yom Kippur afternoon service. The traditional version is a liturgical poem that graphically describes the execution of ten rabbis, among whom were the famous Rabbis Akiba, Ishmael and Shimon ben Gamliel. All of them were sentenced to death for their support of Bar Kochba’s failed revolt against Rome in the year 132.

The Martyrology highlights the profoundly spiritual heroism of the rabbis with the often unbearably graphic details of their executions. We read how Rabbi Akiba managed to proclaim the Shema even as his flesh was being gouged out with iron combs; Rabbi Henania ben Teradion was wrapped in a Torah scroll together with damp wool to ensure he would die a slow and painful death by burning. As the flames consumed him, he cried out to his students that he could see the letters of Torah ascending up to heaven.

Perhaps the most disturbing description comes with the execution of Rabbi Ishmael. As Ishmael wept over the dismembered head of Rabbi ben Gamliel, the emperor Hadrian’s daughter admired his beauty and asked that his life be spared. The emperor then ordered that the Ishmael’s skin be flayed from his face and preserved for posterity.

I think by now you can understand my aversion to the traditional Martyrology. But beyond the graphic imagery, I think I’m even more troubled by the theological reason for it’s inclusion in the Yom Kippur service: namely, the concept of “blood atonement.” According to this theology, we offer the lives of our martyrs in the hopes that their deaths may atone for our misdeeds. Since the destruction of the Temple, we can no longer offer animal sacrifice. But even if we aren’t worthy of God’s mercy, we pray that we may be forgiven on account of their sacrifice. According to this view, you might say, the Ten Rabbis “died for our sins.”

If this sounds familiar to you, it should. Many scholars agree that the original source for this liturgy, Midrash Eleh Ezkerah, comes from the same period and literary tradition as early Christian martyrological literature. But it’s not the Christian associations per se that trouble me – it’s the implications of the theology itself. It’s the suggestion that bloodshed atones. And in particular, it’s the idea that I can somehow be let off the hook because of the tragic death of another person.

Of course it cannot be denied that the literal act of animal sacrifice was the way Israelites originally atoned for their sins. In tomorrow’s Torah portion, we will read how Aaron the High Priest sprinkles the blood of a goat and the blood of an ox over the altar, thus making atonement for all the sins of Israel. It is indeed a powerful image and metaphor indeed, but surely we’ve long given up on the idea that God literally requires blood as a path to forgiveness. And I’m sure that the notion that God might require the bloodshed of human martyrs as an atonement offering would strike many of us as borderline sacreligious.

In more recent years, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist High Holiday liturgies have added other Jewish litanies of persecution to the Martyrology, including the horrors of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust itself. But to my mind, contemporary updating only deepens the essential problem. Do we really want to mythologize these tragic events and understand them as sacred offerings? Do we actually mean to view the death of the six million as a kind of sacrifice to God for our sins? Again, I believe most of us would find such a theology to be profoundly offensive.

So while I do believe we most certainly need to remember and honor our collective Jewish losses, I’ll admit that I’ve long struggled with the concept of martyrdom. And in particular, I’ve struggled to understand how a Martyrology might fit into our Day of Atonement – a day we devote to teshuvah, to repentance, to spiritual repair for the New Year ahead.

Since I received that member’s e-mail, however, I’ve been thinking more about this issue. In many ways, I think, martyrdom it’s is a fairly loaded term. After all, every religious tradition and every community has its martyrs – the figures who are exalted for having made the ultimate sacrifice. But I’m fascinated that the term is often used today colloquially in something of a pejorative context. We’ll use the term “martyr” for someone who relishes playing the role of sufferer, usually as a form of emotional manipulation.

Even so, and even if many of us today have difficulty with the traditional religious conception of martyrdom, I wonder now if American Jews might be able to reconstruct this idea for a post-modern age. And further: I’m wondering if we might possibly find a way to create a Martyrology service that truly be appropriate and meaningful to us on this Day of Atonement.

You might be surprised to learn that martyrdom is actually promoted in certain cases by traditional Jewish law. According to halacha, it is considered preferable to sacrifice one’s life rather than publicly transgress the prohibitions against idolatry, sexual immorality or murder. For centuries, this form of martyrdom has been considered the ultimate way to honor the traditional Jewish concept of Kiddush Hashem (or “the sanctification of God’s name.”)

And clearly there are no shortage of Jewish martyrs throughout Jewish history. There are the men and women of Masada who took their own lives rather than be captured and enslaved by the Romans. In the Second Book of Maccabees we read of Hannah and her sons, who were tortured and killed by Antiochus Epiphanes when they refused to publicly eat pork. During the Inquisition, the Jews of Spain and Portugal were executed or exiled if they refused to renounce their Jewish faith.

Of course when Jews contemplate martyrdom today we cannot avoid those who perished during the Holocaust. But indeed, viewing the victims of the Shoah as martyrs presents a myriad of new complications for us. In the first place, the six million are not mythic martyrs from the distant past – they are very real individuals. They are, quite literally, our fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Unlike the Maccabees or the Jews of the Inquisition, many of us are still personally grieving for these individuals. It isn’t such a simple matter for us to understand their deaths in the context of martyrdom and many of us wouldn’t even begin to try.

Moreover, the Holocaust marks the first time in history that Jews weren’t only killed for religious reasons – for their beliefs or their practices. They were killed because of who they were. Their martyrdom (if that is what we choose to call it) was completely and utterly involuntary. Unlike the deaths of Rabbi Akiba or Hannah, these deaths were not a result of personal action or conscience – or even of their own volition. Those who perished in the Shoah had no intention and certainly no desire to become martyrs.

The Holocaust was certainly one of the most notorious mass murders in modern history. But was it a mass martyrdom? Should we even refer to it in such a way? In thinking through these questions, I recently found turned to a teaching that some might consider to be an unlikely source – namely, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I’m sure all of you are familiar with an infamous event that transpired in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. It was the occasion of an involuntary martyrdom – one that has since become very important in American history . This was the day that a bomb planted by members of the KKK went off in 16^th St. Baptist Church, killing four little girls – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley – and injuring 22 others.

And at the funeral for three of the girls, King gave a famous address that has since been known as “Eulogy for the Martyred Children.” He said as follows:

So they did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. The holy scripture says, “A little child shall lead them.” The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilt blood of these innocent girls may cause the while citizenry of Birmingham to transform the negative extremes of a dark past in to the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed, this tragic event many cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience.

Then King turned to the families of the little girls and said this:

At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

Amongst the many religious texts I’ve read on the meaning of martyrdom, I personally find King’s words to be among the most meaningful and profound. I am particularly moved by his hope, by his realism, but most of all, by his refusal to surrender to the despair that these little girls died for nothing. As daunting as it was, he was determined to find a spark of spiritual meaning in this tragic loss.

Yes, he used the imagery of blood as redemptive – but he did so in a way that affirmed goodness and justice in the face of an evil, unjust act. As horribly tragic as their deaths were, King could not but affirm that their deaths would, as he put it, “serve as a redemptive force” that would eventually bring new light during those very dark times.

However: while King did believe that the loss of these innocents would ultimately bring freedom that much closer, he did not for a second suggest that God somehow required their blood to bring justice to the world. Ever the consummate pastor, King turned to the families of the little girls. Even after affirming their deaths would contribute to the cause of justice, he acknowledged the injustice of their families’ pain. After all, while these four girls had become martyrs to the world, to their loved ones they were daughter, sisters, granddaughters and friends. They were, very simply, Denise, Addie Mae, Carole, and Cynthia.

So yes, King said, “life can be hard, as hard as crucible steel.” Life can be tragic; life can be filled sorrow that feels sometimes feels utterly unbearable. But where is God in the midst of this families’ sorrow? God certainly didn’t receive their deaths as a kind of “sacrificial offering.” Rather, King said, “God walks with us.” God is the Spirit of compassion and strength that lifts us from “fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope,” that transforms “dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.”

As I read these words, I can think of no better way to remember all whom we consider to be martyrs. We begin affirming meaning in the face of tragedy and loss. We affirm justice even amidst the pain of the injustice. We mourn our loss, and finally, we do what we must to bring some kind of meaning to our loss – to ensure that these deaths were not in vain.

And as I think about it, perhaps this is why we read a Martyrology on Yom Kippur. As we remember our martyrs, we search our own souls and ask ourselves honestly: what have we done in the past year to prove ourselves worthy of these profound sacrifices? What have we done to affirm that these people did not die in vain? Did we indeed honor their memories by transforming loss into justice and hope for our world?

To put it more specifically: as we recall our Jewish ancestors who died for practicing their faith, we must ask: have we done what we can to ensure that Judaism – this exquisite spiritual tradition of ours – will be passed on to future generations? When we tell of those who died in pursuit of political freedom, we must admit openly: how we have failed to ensure that these freedoms are extended to all in our nation and our world? And as we mourn the lives of six million lost, we must ask ourselves honestly: how can it be that more than sixty years after the Shoah, sixty years after this most radical form of inhumanity, sixty years of saying “Never Again,” we still continue to remain silent in the face of genocide?

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve begun to envision a new kind of Martyrology service: one that honors our dead but also one that challenges and awakens us to action. And since we are not only Jews, but also Americans and citizens of the world, I believe it would be critical to include non-Jewish martyrs as well: American figures such as, yes, the four young girls from Birmingham or, sadly, Dr. Martin Luther King himself. Or courageous figures from around the world, people such as Stephen Biko, whose death became a rallying cry against South African apartheid. Such a service might also provide us with the opportunity to learn more about international human rights heroes in our own day and consider how we might honor their memories.

Clearly, the individuals we choose to include would reflect our own values – and I’d welcome the opportunity to explore together what a JRC Martyrology service might eventually look like. In the meantime, we have added a section to tomorrow afternoon’s Yizkor service that will give us the opportunity to honor the memory of the six million. Among other things, it includes these powerful words of the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who survived World World II in Vilna and died only this past January at the age of 96:

Survivors! Inherit, with your happiness,

The tears of each of us, flickering in that vise

Remember: Inhale our dying.

Never forget: Be martyrs to life.

I invite you now to think for yourselves: Who are the courageous individuals whose sacrifices inspire you be “martyrs to life?” How will you honor their memory? What will you do in the coming year to bring meaning to their sacrifice?

When we honor our martyrs on Yom Kippur we stand up against hopelessness and fear. Yes, it is natural to be fearful in a world that sometimes feels as hard as crucible steel. But as long as there are survivors who will bear witness to the sacrifices of those who have gone before us, it seems to me, we do our part to keep their dreams of peace and justice alive.

I’d like to close now with a quote from a another contemporary martyr: El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered in 1980 for courageously promoting freedom and justice in his country. In the coming year and the years beyond, may we all prove ourselves worthy of his words:

Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.

And to that let us all say,

Amen.

So what is the real issue here?  I don’t think it’s about sensitivity to individuals who may or may not be offended by this particular construction project. The real issue is really quite straightforward. The real issue, I believe, is the same as it ever was – and as Jews, it’s an issue we know all too well. Will America be a land of religious liberty for all or merely the few?

Click below to read the entire sermon:

I think many of us experienced something of a first last night.  I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that even the most seasoned High Holiday worshipers among us never had to to run a gauntlet of anti-semitic protesters outside Rosh Hashanah services before.

For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure of this experience, I’m very sorry to report that a small group from the Westboro Baptist Church spent their evening picketing in front of a variety of High Holiday venues in the area. Westboro is a notorious hate group led by a gentleman named Fred Phelps and is known for their incredibly noxious protests of everything to soldiers funerals, to Gay Pride rallies. Apparently they hate Jews as well – as their signs and their chants indicated. What can I say other than this is not how any of us expected to be greeted on the eve of our holiest season of the year?

As I mentioned last night, the one major ray of light in this whole sorry episode was the incredible amount of support, well-wishes and blessings that I received from faith leaders and colleagues literally from the moment the demonstration was announced. Last night, as we lit the holiday candles I was honored to invite my very dear friends and colleagues Father Cotton Fite and Imam Mailk Mujahid to share words with us from the bimah. We where also honored by the presence of Reverend Dean Francis, who serves here at First United Methodist, who was on hand to greet JRC members as they left services. It was a truly comforting reminder that JRC is part of a very, very special and supportive interfaith community.

I suppose some might say that the smaller consolation is that this group, Westboro, seems to be an equal opportunity offender. They seem to hate just about every group and religion under the sun. Their views are so off the charts extreme – and in many cases so patently bizarre –  that it’s actually not always clear what exactly they stand for except maybe the reverence of intolerance itself.

So yes, Westboro’s hate rhetoric is so grotesquely extreme, that we  might be tempted to dismiss them as a radical group of wackos. But of course it’s not that easy. They may been extreme in their views, but at the end of the day, prejudice is prejudice. And the sad truth is that this one group is really represent an exaggerated version of attitudes that have been ingrained in American life for centuries.

It’s an irony of American history that while the earliest colonists of our nation were fleeing from religious persecution, religious intolerance has been an indelible part of our national culture from the beginning. We Jews know this only too well, of course. While this country has provided an unprecedented haven for Jewish immigrants, we all know with the darker side of our national narrative: an abiding intolerance and hatred of minority groups – a familiar kind of ugliness that rears its head particularly during times of economic stress and hardship.

So yes, we shouldn’t dismiss the brand of hate spewed by clowns like Fred Phelps and the Westboro gang. But I would also suggest that it’s only an exaggerated version of something much more troubling: an intolerance that’s packaged in a more acceptable wrapper and peddled by so-called “mainstream” politicians and talk show hosts – popular demagogues who have a much, much larger constituency.

And so here we are today. We all know the signs. We’re living in a fearful post-9/11 national culture currently experiencing it’s worst economic downturn in generations.  We’re rolling headlong into the kind of era that’s historically been quite fertile for bigotry, scapegoating and hate-mongering. Only this time around, Islamophobia is now the racism of choice.

I know we’re all familiar with the uproar that’s been stirred up in our country over the building of an Islamic Community Center (known as Park51) two blocks away from Ground Zero. It’s a debate has given rise to deeply hateful and ignorant characterizations of Muslims and Islamic tradition – and much of it is coming from prominent political officials and public figures.

Newt Gingrich says that building this center two blocks from Ground Zero would be “like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”  A New York gubernatorial candidate says the center would constitute a threat to New Yorkers’ “personal security and safety.”  Leaders are sponsoring regular rallies at Ground Zero that sport signs such as: “”All I Need to Know About Islam, I Learned on 9/11.” And in Florida, as we all know, a pastor of a insignificant congregation is seeking publicity in the sickest way – and frankly the less said about him, the better…

These kinds of statements should ring warning bells for us as Jews – especially when they come from our elected officials. I’ve been proud to see that by and large, many prominent leaders and organizations in the Jewish community have supported Park51 against this basest form of prejudice.  But I have to say I was profoundly disappointed when the Anti-Defamation League, one of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country, publicly came out in opposition to the project.

This is what the ADL said in its released statement:

Ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.  In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

Shortly after releasing this statement, the ADL’s director Abraham Foxman said this in an interview with the New York Times: “Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational.” And referring to the loved ones of 9/11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Foxman’s statement is actually incredibly revealing. In a way, I think we owe him a great debt, because though he didn’t intend to, I believe he illuminates the essential choice that lays before us all. What is our vision for this country? Do we live in a country that entitles certain citizens to positions that are irrational and bigoted?  Will we countenance bigotry and irrationality as long as it is not being directed toward us?

It’s also telling that Foxman and others like him essentially frame this as a thorny complicated issue between the rights of American Muslims and sensitivity to 9/11 survivors. I’d suggest it’s really not all that “complicated.” After all, 9/11 is a traumatic memory for all Americans. Americans of many faiths were murdered on that horrible day, including, yes, Muslims. The Americans of many faiths were among the first responders and volunteers who rescued victims, including, yes, Muslims. And the dead of 9/11 are mourned by Americans of many faiths, including, yes, Muslims.

And if the issue is about sensitivity to the people of Lower Manhattan, it’s important to point out that Muslims have been part of the social fabric of that area for decades. Muslims have long been been living, working and praying in these neighborhoods and there are already mosques quite close to Ground Zero. Indeed, most of the residents, shopkeepers and merchants of this area have no problem with the prospect of an Islamic community center in their backyard. The project was endorsed by its community board twenty-nine to one, and according to a recent poll a majority of Manhattan residents already support it.

So what is the real issue here?  I don’t think it’s about sensitivity to individuals who may or may not be offended by this particular construction project. The real issue is really quite straightforward. The real issue, I believe, is the same as it ever was – and as Jews, it’s an issue we know all too well. Will America be a land of religious liberty for all or merely the few?

In truth, America is by far the most religiously diverse country in the world – and this is something of which we should be enormously proud. With each wave of immigration has come a new piece of the national mosaic. And on the other side of the equation, as each group has made their home in America, their religions have also in a sense become “Americanized” in crucial ways.

Today, Islam is the fastest growing religious group in the country. According to a Pew Research Study released in 2007, there are currently 2.35 million Muslims living in the US. The study also found that Muslim Americans themselves are a highly diverse population but that they are decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes. This belief is reflected in their income and education levels, which generally mirror those of the American public. And perhaps most notably, the report found moreover that Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by significantly larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries

It should also be stated that Islamophobia is significantly worse in other countries where Muslims are a minority. There’s nothing like what we’re seeing in Europe, where France has banned the burqa and Switzerland has a new law against building minarets.

Indeed, most Muslims feel safer and freer in the US than anywhere else in the Western world.  And we’re beginning to see important signs of this: two American Muslims have been elected to Congress, and this year for the first time a Muslim was named Miss USA. Our country’s first Muslim college, Zaytuna College just formally opened its doors in Berkeley last month. The college’s motto is, tellingly, “Where Islam Meets America.”

But with all of this success, there are ominous signs that push-back and intolerance are growing – and many observers say was this even the case before 9/11. Since that day, there is an abiding sense among many – even among those who consider themselves liberal – that Muslims represent a kind of “fifth column” in our country. According to a more recent Pew study, less than a third of Americans hold a favorable view of Islam and about a third think Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.

And so, I’d like to recommend a book to you. I read it shortly after the Lower Manhattan controversy began to erupt and I found it to be one of the most important and insightful books on religion in America that I’ve ever read. It’s called “What’s Right With Islam is What’s Right With America” and it was written by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf – the man behind the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center.

Imam Abdul Rauf is an adherent of Sufi Islam who was born in Kuwait and came to the US as a teenager in the 1960s.  Since that time has become a major figure in the American Muslim community as well as leader in interfaith dialogue in this country.  He is well known in the interfaith community for espousing the notion that the core values of Islam have much in common with the core values of American democracy.

This is, essentially, the thesis of his book. At the outset, he makes a claim that he admits might seem strange to some: that he considers America to be an “Islamic” country inasmuch as our government embodies the principles that Islamic law – or Shariah – requires of a government.

In his book, Imam Abdul Rauf painstakingly examines both Islamic law as well as American political tradition, and he makes the compelling argument that both traditions consider values such as civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and the equality of women to be sacrosanct.  He goes on to say he believes these are core values shared by all faith traditions, including secular humanism.

He writes in his book:

We strive for a “New Cordoba,” a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like. In this good society all religious voices are welcome and given maximum freedom, and no one religion (or even atheism) is allowed to inhibit another. Toward this dream we aspire.

This is the Imam who is currently being put through the ringer in our national discourse. This man – who publicly claims Islamic piety compels him to be a better American, an American Muslim leader who actively reaches out and dialogues with leaders other faith traditions, who goes on trips around the world sponsored by the State Department where he preaches the importance of moderate Islam – this is the man whose affiliations and loyalties are now being questioned, who ideas are being publicly distorted, whose Islamic community center is now called a “shrine to Al-Queda” by our public officials.

Although I am not a Muslim myself, I related a great deal to much of what the Imam had to say in his book. In particular, I deeply appreciated how he looks to America to make him a better Muslim and how he believes his Islamic faith makes him a better American. If this sounds vaguely familiar to some of you, this is, in fact, precisely what Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan sought to do a century ago when he founded Reconstructionist Judaism. Like Imam Abdul-Rauf, Rabbi Kaplan came to this country as a teenager. Living as a traditional Jew in modern America, Kaplan sought to create a Judaism that truly lived in consonance with values of democracy, pluralism, freedom of thought, and equal rights. Like him, Imam Abdul-Rauf has much to teach us all about what it means to be a religious American.

And so we would do well to ask: what exactly is our vision of this country? Will Americans continue to let fear to rule our attitudes toward Islam and other faiths, or will try to actively learn about and from one another – precisely because we are Americans?

I’d like to close with an excerpt from another book you should read. It’s called “A New Religious America.” It was written by Diana Eck, a scholar of Comparative Religion at Harvard University. I’d suggest that her vision of our national culture is profound and exceedingly important for us all:

She writes:

“We the people of the United States” now form the most profusely religious nation on earth. But many, if not most, Christian, Jewish, or secular Americans have never visited a mosque or a Hindu or Buddhist temple. Many Americans are not so sure what Sikhs or Muslims believe, let alone Jains and Zoroastrians. Similarly, Muslim or Hindu Americans may have a sketchy and stereotypical view of Christians and Jews. So where do we go from here? It’s one thing to be unconcerned about or ignorant of Muslim or Buddhist neighbors on the other side of the world, but when Buddhists are our next-door neighbors, when our children are best friends with Muslim classmates, when a Hindu is running for a seat on the school committee, all of us have a new vested interest in our neighbors, both as citizens and as people of faith.

As the new century dawns, we Americans are challenged to make good on the promise of religious freedom so basic to the very idea and image of America. Religious freedom has always given rise to religious diversity, and never has our diversity been more dramatic than it is today. This will require us to reclaim the deepest meaning of the very principles we cherish and to create a truly pluralist American society in which this great diversity is not simply tolerated but becomes the very source of our strength. But to do this, we will all need to know more than we do about one another and to listen for the new ways in which new Americans articulate the “we” and contribute to the sound and spirit of America.

Those of us who share this vision cannot dither on this question. There are too many in this country who are threatened by our increasing diversity. They are finding their voice and, yes, they are amassing political clout. If we agree our diversity is truly the source of our strength and not simply a fact to be tolerated, then we will need to find the courage of our convictions and we will need to act upon them. And the first step, as Diana Eck suggests, is to learn about and from one another.

I’ve always been proud that interfaith programming and learning has been a priority at JRC. It’s never felt so crucial to me than it does right now. I pledge to make this a priority. If we are truly committed to a pluralistic vision of this country, we will have to reach out to one another now more than ever.  And the coalitions we build will become increasingly more critical in the years ahead.

I’ll conclude with a verse from the Koran: “O people, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into races and tribes so that you may know each other.” This has always been our test. On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the birth of our world and the rebirth of our humanity. We affirm the divine image in all people and pledge to be worthy of it.  God has made us into peoples and tribes not so that we might build higher walls between us but so that we may truly know each other.

This is our test – let it be our blessing for this New Year.

Amen.

So here’s my question for this Rosh Hashanah: how will you leave the familiarity of your home in the coming year? In ways will you challenge your sense of comfort and complacency and find the strength to venture into unknown territory? To a place that holds out a promise, but no guarantees? For some of you, this coming year might be a time of a significant life transition: how might you mark this experience so that it offers you real potential for transformation and growth? For others, this year might be not all that different from the last. How will you challenge that comfortable sameness? What might you do to, in a sense to create a doorway that leads outward?

Click below to read the entire sermon:

Two years ago, I gave a sermon in which I discussed the spiritual theme of “coming home.” I’m sure you’ve all long since committed that sermon to memory, but just in case you need a little reminding: I began by commenting how strange it was that we never actually get to read about the Israelites’ entrance into the Promised Land in the Torah.

This is what I said:

When you think about it, the Torah really is the ultimate cliffhanger. It starts with the promise of coming home, it brings the nation to the threshold, then it rewinds right back to the beginning and starts all over again.

If you do want to read about the homecoming, of course, you can. That occurs in the sequel to the Torah – otherwise known as Nevi’im or Prophets. But you know what they say about sequels. It’s never, or almost never, as good as the original. The homecoming is actually quite a messy business. Nothing really goes according to plan, and things go downhill fairly quickly. Those who have read on in Nevi’im invariably understand why the Torah ends where it does – and why only these first five books are invariably considered to be our most sacred of writings.

The reason, I believe, is because Judaism has always found redemption not in the homecoming itself, but in the process of coming home.  And if you think about it, this makes perfect sense: if you understand the world in terms of sacred history, homecoming represents the end of history.  Once you arrive home, the story is over.  (Anyone who has seen “The Wizard of Oz” knows this to be true).

Well, it’s two years later and I’m here to tell you I’ve reconsidered things.  I’ve changed my mind.  Since giving that sermon, I’ve come to believe that there is another spiritual theme that is even more compelling, more essential than the experience of “coming home.”  And strangely enough, it’s actually the polar opposite: that’s right: it’s the experience of “leaving home.”

Now, I realize that this might sound odd or at least counter-intuitive. “Leaving home?” What’s so spiritually comforting about that? Isn’t home where we want to be?  Isn’t home the epitome of safety and security?  At the end of the day, don’t we all yearn to find our way back home?

Maybe so – but I would also argue that it’s the moment we leave home that the true spiritual transformation occurs. When we leave behind the comfortable and the familiar, when we choose to go beyond the safe and secure. The moment we decide we’re ready to risk everything we’ve ever known for that which only might be.

Actually, when you come to think of it, just about every classic story in the Torah involves individuals leaving home. And as a result of these moments, they are transformed in pretty fundamental ways.

The first leave-taking, of course, occurs when Adam and Eve are forced to depart from the Garden of Eden. And what does their departure represent?  I tend to believe that their exit from the Garden represents the moment in which they truly grow up. In Eden, they live a naive and childlike existence where they want for nothing. But when the eat of the fruit, when their eyes are opened to the truth of the world outside the Garden, they are transformed into adults, as it were.

Of course this transformation can only fully take place once they leave Eden and make their way in the world. And, yes one of the first lessons they learn is that the world is not a paradise. The world can be a difficult and challenging and harsh place. But on the other hand, unlike Eden, where each day is like the last, the real world is a dynamic place. A place of potential: where transformation, growth and change are always around the corner.

Another paradigmatic “leaving-home story” occurs when God comes to Abraham and Sarah and tells them to leave their father’s house in their native land of Ur-Kasdin and head out to a land that God will show them. It’s notable that God doesn’t immediately tell them where they will be going. And in truth, their final destination isn’t really all that important. It’s the act of leave-taking itself, the event in which they leave behind the known and the comfortable for nothing more than a promise – this is the moment that defines their spiritual transformation.

There are many, many more such moments. In tomorrow morning’s Torah portion, we’ll read a story in which Abraham casts his wife Hagar and his son Ishmael out of their home and into the wilderness, where they eventually experience a divine encounter and promise of their own. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, God comes to Abraham in the middle of the night and commands him to leave his home the next morning with his son Isaac and sacrifice him on a mountaintop that God will show him.

Still later in the Torah, Jacob has flees from his home to escape the wrath of his twin brother Esau. As he encamps in the wilderness, God appears to him in a dream amidst a ladder of ascending and descending angels. In the book of Exodus, Moses has to leave his home in Egypt after killing an Egyptian slave master. Shortly after, he experiences a divine revelation – again in the wilderness – from the midst of a burning bush.

The most dramatic and epic leave-taking moment in the Torah of course, occurs when the Israelites leave Egypt. They escape, yes, into the wilderness – where God is revealed to them at Mt. Sinai. While it might seem strange to say Egypt was the Israelites’ “home,” one of the many lessons of this story is that we don’t always make our homes in the healthiest places.  As oppressive as it was, Egypt was indeed their home to during their enslavement.  In fact, the story indicates that they felt a little too much at home there. Just think about how reluctant they were were to leave – and how much they pined away for the comforts of Egypt during their wanderings.

One of the most powerful common denominators in these stories, as you have probably deduced by now, is that most of them involve leaving home and heading off into the wilderness. The wilderness, of course, represents the unknown, the uncharted, the place of potential danger – but, notably, that the wilderness is invariably the place where God is encountered. Interestingly, the word for “wilderness,” “midbar” and the Hebrew verb “to speak,” “l’daber” share a common root. The Torah may be suggesting here an important connection between the wilderness and speech – more precisely divine speech.

In other words, it’s only when we leave the comfort and familiarity of home and head into the elemental terrain of the wilderness, that we’re able to truly hear the voice of God.  In this regard, the wilderness represents an existential place far from the noise of culture, artifice and ego. The journey into the wilderness is not only geographic but experiential: it leads both to the outermost reaches of terrain and the innermost reaches of the human soul. This is the place, in short, where the Divine Presence dwells.

Another obvious common denominator between these stories is this: almost all of them involve a significant element of danger.  In many cases, leave-taking is a matter of life and death. Jacob runs away from home because his brother Esau seeks to kill him.  Moses escapes to Midian because Pharaoh wants him dead. Later, the Israelites will leave Egypt, and is immediately pursued by Pharaoh’s army.

So why are they all running for their lives?  My favorite explanation comes from the commentator Sylvia Boornstein, who writes:

They are running for their lives because without this kind of direct and mindful experience of our lives, it is as if we are dead. The bell continues to ring, but it is as if we are not there, as if we are not experiencing our lives, as if our lives are going on without us. So we see these biblical figures taking leave of a kind of living death. Entombed in habit and convention, they are dead to their lives. Taking leave, they are literally running for their lives – toward their lives – rushing toward on embrace of their actual present-tense experience. (From “Be Still And Get Going” by Alan Lew, p. 19)

In other words, while home and hearth might well represent comfort and tranquility to the traveler, once we reach home it invariably becomes a place we use to escape reality – a of place complacency, rather than comfort. And so, one way or another, we all have to leave home. We have no choice. If we don’t, our existence may well become a kind of living death. But when we find the strength and the courage to take a step beyond our front door, when we embrace the unknown terrain outside our front door, when we truly encounter the world – that’s when we truly live.

So what does this mean for us in realistically?  Obviously, most of us aren’t necessarily able to pack up, leave our homes and head out and go on a vision quest in the Kalahari.  Our existences feel so utterly wrapped up, so enmeshed in managing our complicated home lives. And now here’s your rabbi telling you that you have to leave your home in order to truly live?

The first thing I’d suggest is to think about this metaphor in existential terms. Whether we prefer to call it spiritual experience, inner growth, or personal transformation, we leave home whenever we depart from our comfort zones, when we leave the familiar and the known behind, and head out with no with no guarantees. Nothing but the promise – sometimes merely the hope of a promise – of a better future.

So no, we don’t need to pull a Kerouac to actually leave home. We just have to leave find a way to regularly challenge our sense of complacency, to resist what is safe and familiar –to welcome the unknown territory outside our door with openness and love.

In truth, we’re already doing this in a myriad of ways without even realizing it. For most of us in middle class America, the paradigmatic moment of leave-taking occurs when we graduate from high school.  This has, become in fact, one of the most central and profound rites of passage in our lives. We are all too familiar with the crazy mixed-up emotions that accompany this passage: joy, sadness, excitement, fear, elation, trepidation, mystery…

But when you think about it, when a child leaves home, it’s not only the child who is leaving home. In an experiential sense, the parents are leaving home as well. Just like their son or daughter, they are going through the very same process, traveling through the very same emotional terrain, only from the other side of the equation.

There are so many other examples of experiential leave taking in our lives. When we start a meaningful new relationship. When we start a new career. When we have a child. There are actually so many ways large and small in which we leave behind the familiar home we know and set out into uncharted waters. And in each case, these forms of “leave-taking offer us the opportunity for transformation: to face the truth of our lives and the reality of the world around us.

So here’s my question for this Rosh Hashanah: how will you leave the familiarity of your home in the coming year? In ways will you challenge your sense of comfort and complacency and find the strength to venture into unknown territory? To a place that holds out a promise, but no guarantees? For some of you, this coming year might be a time of a significant life transition: how might you mark this experience so that it offers you real potential for transformation and growth? For others, this year might be not all that different from the last. How will you challenge that comfortable sameness? What might you do to, in a sense to create a doorway that leads outward?

There are indeed ways we can consciously incorporate leave-taking into our lives. That is the essential function of worship and all forms of spiritual discipline, after all. Indeed, those who pray, practice yoga or meditate regularly – or even those who work out – will attest that these disciplines allow them to leave everyday consciousness behind and experience a deeper form of awareness – to dwell in the reality of the moment. We also know conclusively that these forms of spiritual discipline are not only important for our spiritual health, but for our physical well-being as well. So it turns out that we leave home in this way, we may quite literally be “running for our lives” after all.

Now I don’t mean to romanticize any of this for a second. Going forth is no easy matter. It’s not what you’d call “fun.” Going forth can often be brutal, especially when you are, so to speak “kicked out of the house.” It’s one thing to be an Abraham and a Sarah, bidden by God to set out on a spiritual odyssey with the promise that their family will become a great nation. It’s quite another to be thrown out and abandoned in the wilderness like Hagar and and Ishmael.

Pastorally speaking, I’d never dare for a second to suggest to someone who was going through this kind of pain that that’s actually an opportunity for a deeper spiritual life.  I’m also aware that it’s all well and good for me to rhapsodize about the spiritual importance of leaving home when the homelessness is such a very real issue for us around the world and in our own country. Believe me, I know it’s all well and good for those of us who actually have actual homes to wax romantic about the experience of leaving home.

But I will say this: those of us who are blessed with warm comfortable homes would well to realize that they are actually much more illusory than we are willing to admit – and that we dwell in them,  if you pardon the expression, “but for the grace of God…” I’d also suggest that the more we manage to leave the complacency of our comfortable homes, the more empathic we will become toward those who lack these kinds of blessings. I daresay the ones most likely to devote themselves to ending the injustice of homelessness, poverty and hunger are the ones who are willing to go beyond their comfort zones. The ones who with the courage to head deep into the wilderness and face up to the hard truths about our world.

It’s not a simple matter at all to leave that which we know for that which we don’t.  Living as we do in a middle class culture that venerates comfort and security, it might seem like a radical suggestion that we should leave it all behind.  But what is our our alternative?  Think about it. At the end of the day, we all have to leave home. Sooner or later, we all will have to leave what it is that we’ve come to know, cross over that threshold and greet the unknown.

It recently occurred to me that the most two basic aspects of life itself – namely, birth and death – are both essentially forms of leave taking.  In both cases – when we’re born and when we die – we leave the familiar comfort of the present for the uncomfortable unknown of the future.  In both cases, we resist leaving the comfort of our current “home” with everything in our being. But in both cases, staying home is simply not an option.

In so many ways, the High Holidays give us the opportunity to face up to these truths.  After all, Rosh Hashanah is the annual celebration of our rebirth. We leave the familiar home of a year that’s past, a year still resonant with memories, and prepare ourselves to enter a year that remains yet to unfold.

How do we do this? How do we reckon with the unknown territory of the year ahead? We proclaim as part of our liturgy:“Hayom harat olam!” “On this day the world is born!”  We call Rosh Hashanah the birthday of the world – which means that this the day in which we affirm that our own worlds can truly be created anew. Like newborns, we leave the home of the past and find the wherewithal to enter the wilderness of a new year.

Our liturgy and rituals over the next ten days will give us the opportunity to wrestle with the deepest, most element truths of our lives and our world. In the coming year some of us will live and some of us will die. How can we enter a new year with such radical uncertainty? We will come together. We will offer up prayers that express our most honest confessions and deepest longings. We will pray for a year of blessing. We will mourn those whom we’ve lost. And only then we will we be ready to take that step over the threshold of a year yet to come.

So here we are. Another new year has arrived. Another door has opened before us. The gates have opened wide. Let’s join hands, step forward, and walk through them together.

Click below for more:

I’m often intrigued by the way every community tells its own stories – the mythic accounts they tell and retell that define who they are as a people. We Jews, of course, have been a story-telling people from time immemorial. We certainly do not lack for tales – which taken together, reflect a great deal about our collective sense of ourselves, what we hold sacred, how we understand our place in the world.

Every one of us has our personal favorites. There are the well-known ones, of course: the Exodus, the covenant at Sinai, the return from Babylonian exile.  But beyond the Jewish People’s “Greatest Hits,” there are a myriad of other important, central stories to choose from. They may not be as popular or recited nearly as often, but in their way, I believe they can illuminate just as much, if not more, about our own sense of our collective Jewish self.

I’ve been thinking about this lately – mainly because lately I seem to find myself returning again and again to one particular story. I’d like to share it with you today – along with a few thoughts as to why I love it so much – and why it’s my choice as the “defining Jewish story.”

It’s the story of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the founding of Yavneh. Many of you may be familiar with this particular story, or at least parts of it. It comes primarily from Talmudic sources and is essentially a mix of historical events and popular legend.

Yohanan ben Zakkai was a leading Jewish sage in Jerusalem who lived during a pivotal moment in Jewish history: before, during and after the destruction of the Temple in the year 73 ACE.  Ben Zakkai was a pupil of the great Rabbi Hillel and one of the rabbinical authorities responsible for transmitting the chain of Jewish law and tradition.  He was a Pharisee, but he also came from a priestly family – and he was known for admonishing his fellow priests for putting themselves above the common people.

Ben Zakkai was one of the central Jewish leaders during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. If you’ve studied this period, then you know there was a great deal of conflict in the Jewish community over how to  respond to the Roman threat. Leading rabbis such as Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel actively advocated armed revolt against Rome. There were also various sects of zealots who were also proliferating around this time. They viewed this crisis in apocalyptic terms, seeing it as a precursor to the coming of the Messiah.

Yohanan Ben Zakkai, was Ben Gamliel’s deputy, but he pointedly refused to take part in the revolt. For his part, Ben Zakkai counseled moderation in the face of what he considered to be growing fanaticism and over-confidence. In reaction to the rebels who were gaining control of the country and destroying non-Jewish shrines, he was quoted as saying, “Do not hasten to tear down the altars of gentiles, lest you be forced to rebuild them with your own hands.” He also spoke out against rising messianism with this famous quote: “If you hold a sapling in your hand and someone says the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go to welcome the Messiah.”

Ben Zakkai lived trapped in Jerusalem along with many other Jews at the time of the siege. As the Romans prepared to breach the city walls, Jewish zealots were guarding its gates to prevent anyone from leaving. And so, with the help of his pupils, Ben Zakkai was smuggled out of Jerusalem by hiding in a coffin. Shortly thereafter, as Jerusalem fell, he appeared before the Roman commander Vespasian and asked him to allow the surviving Jewish religious leadership to reconstitute itself in a small town called Yavneh.

The destruction of the Temple was a cataclysmic event in Jewish history. The center of Jewish life had now been ripped away and by all rights, this would have been the moment that the party was over: the moment in which Judaism now became just a mere footnote in a history book. But Ben Zakkai refused to accept that the end of the Temple necessarily meant the end of Judaism itself. According to a famous midrash:

Once when Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was leaving Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua was walking behind him and saw the Temple in ruins. Rabbi Joshua said, “Woe to us that this has been destroyed, the place where atonement was made for the sins of Israel.” Rabbi Yohanan responded, “No, my son, do you not know that we have a means of making atonement that is just like it? And what is it? It is deeds of love and mercy, as it is written: ‘For I desire kindness, and not sacrifice.’” (Hosea 6:6)

And so, under Ben Zakkai’s leadership, Judaism transformed fundamentally: from a cultic system that revolved around a central sacrificial system, to a full-fledged religion based on sacred deeds: based on worship, study, and acts of lovingkindness.

Ben Zakkai proceeded to reconstitute the Sanhedrin – the central Jewish court – in Yavneh, which now become the new spiritual center of learning for the Jewish people. The new leadership in Yavneh proceeded to proclaim new moons and holidays and they instituted numerous changes in Jewish law that had now become necessary with the destruction of the Temple. In short order, Yavneh had filled the void that had been created by this tragic cataclysm.

I will confess to you: the more I think of this story – the more I study it – the more sacred it becomes for me. I’m comfortable in saying Ben Zakkai is one of my huge Jewish heroes. I believe his story is a quintessential, perhaps the quintessential, Jewish story. And though it is certainly a historical account from a very unique place and time, I believe his story has lost none of its immediacy or urgency for us today.

I find this story to be relevant to us for three essential reasons. The first has to do with some of the things I spoke of on Rosh Hashanah: I believe Ben Zakkai’s actions during this crisis powerfully models the sacred Jewish imperative of pursuing peace at all costs. As I pointed out last week – and as Ben Zakkai demonstrates – “Seek Peace and Pursue It” is not simply a moral platitude.  It’s an eminently practical and effective form of direct action that has the power to save lives.

As I pointed out, Ben Zakkai was well known in his day as a vocal proponent for peace and was not among the rabbis who advocated rebellion. Those who did are today considered to be heroes by Jewish tradition. In fact, their legacy has actually been enshrined in the Martyrology section of the traditional Yom Kippur service. This is the section that recalls, in very vivid detail, the tragic torture and executions of the ten rabbis who led the rebellion against Rome – including Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon be Gamliel.

I understand why we honor these heroic rabbinic martyrs as part of our liturgy – but I’ve often been puzzled why we don’t honor the other side of the equation: Rabbi Yochanan, and ones who chose life. After all, isn’t “choose life” one of the most basic imperatives of our tradition?  To be sure, Ben Zakkai’s choice to sneak out of Jerusalem to strike a deal with a Roman commander might seem cowardly to some – especially when compared to the story of the ten rabbis or the martyrs of Masada – another oft told story from this period. Nevertheless, it was this “cowardly” action that ensured life for the Jewish people and Jewish tradition. After all, none of us present here today are actually the heirs to the Jews of Masada – the ones who chose to take their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman army. We’re the ancestors, literally and spiritually, of the ones who chose Yavneh. At the end of the day, we’re the heirs of the ones who chose life.

If relatively few Jews know much about Rabbi Ben Zakkai, I’m sure even fewer know of Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum. During the Holocaust, Rabbi Nissenbaum was a prominent rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto who advocated a concept he called “Kiddush Hachayim,” which literally means “sanctification of life.”  In doing this, he was providing a pointed alternative to the classical notion of Jewish martyrdom known as “Kiddush Hashem.”  Rabbi Nissenbaum rejected the idea of dying for a sacred cause. As he saw it, remaining alive at any cost was viewed a way of denying the Nazi’s intention to physically annihilate the Jewish people. Remaining alive was a sacred form of resistance in its own right. As I see it, this is one of Ben Zakkai’s most sacred legacies to us as well.

The second reason I find this story compelling: it demonstrates Judaism’s miraculous power to respond when the world around it changes. As I mentioned before, the destruction of the Temple was a true turning point – perhaps the turning point in Jewish history. It could well have become the moment in which Judaism called it a day and said, “Well, it’s been a nice run, but the party’s over. That’s it. We’ve reached the end of the road.” And there were many in the Jewish community like the Saducees and other sects who said precisely that.

But Ben Zakkai and his followers modeled a different approach: an approach that responded to crisis with creativity and innovation. We can’t offer sacrifices? That’s OK. We’ll look to prayer and good deeds to be the functional equivalent of sacrifice. And, at the end of the day, what is sacrifice, but the outer ritual: the medium, rather than the sacred message. At the end of the day, the essential message, the essence of Judaism goes much deeper than the ritual acts themselves.

No more Temple in Jerusalem? That’s OK, synagogues and houses of study will now become the communal centers of Jewish life. Judaism does not have to be geographically specific. We don’t need to live in or around Jerusalem to be a player. Jews can create community, worship God, perform sacred acts anywhere in the land of Israel – or anywhere in the world for that matter. Judaism will now become a religious tradition for a nation of wanderers – a sacred system designed to be taken on the road.

No more priests to lead the people of Israel? Not a problem. Rabbis will now constitute the new leadership model for the Jewish people: leaders who achieve their position through study and learning, not through their family line. Jewish life will flourish wherever there are Jewish leaders learned enough to rule on matters of Jewish law.

I personally believe this is the sort of spiritual creativity that has enabled the Jewish people to survive as long as they have. We’ve historically greeted change in a spirit of openness and innovation – and in this way we’ve allowed Jewish tradition to evolve and thrive over the centuries. And isn’t this what we Reconstructionists say about the inherent strength of Jewish civilization: that it is a dynamic and ever-evolving organism?

Perhaps it’s a bit self-serving to say, but I believe Rabbi Ben Zakkai one of the first great Reconstructionists. In a time of crisis and change, he respected the dynamism of Judaism enough to not only survive, but to flourish. And in many ways, I believe he helped set the stage for the future evolution of Jewish civilization.  Over the centuries Judaism has always emerged from these critical historical turning points – and has found itself better and stronger for it.

Indeed, many historians have pointed out that the most important and creative chapters in Jewish history have invariably come out of crisis. And by crisis I do not simply mean historical tragedy. As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan has pointed out, the onset of modernity has been welcome for the Jewish community in so many ways – but it has also has presented us with huge challenges, some in their way as transformative as the ones faced by Ben Zakkai’s generation.

How will Judaism face the theological challenges of our day? How will it grow in consonance with contemporary democracy and egalitarian ideals? How will it grow to incorporate the growing diversity of the Jewish community? Can Judaism evolve out of its historically insular, tribal nature and respond to the world’s new globalized reality?  We will only really live to know the answers if we choose to respond as Ben Zakkai, by engaging these challenges with open mindedness and creativity.

Which leads me to the third and final reason why I consider Ben Zakkai’s story so compelling. In short: it affirms hope and rejects despair. This is, I believe, the quintessentially Jewish way of living in the world. For beyond the historical and political implications of this story, it contains a profoundly spiritual message: we must respond to upheaval and uncertainty with hope and faith. And in the end, can there be any better way to live our lives?

It is important to note that Jewish tradition does not simply view the destruction of the Temple as a historical moment: on a much deeper level, it is a mythic event that represents the existential ruptures in our own lives and our world. When a bride and groom break a glass at a Jewish wedding, for instance, they aren’t simply marking an event that occurred thousands of years ago. As they leave the sacred protection of their wedding canopy, they do with the acknowledgement that the world they are entering is not a perfect world. It is a world that will be filled with challenge, with struggle, and yes, even with pain. But by breaking the glass, they are demonstrating, just like Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai and the Jews of Yavneh, that they have the commitment and faith to face up to the challenges of the outside world together.

And so too with all of us, on each and every day of our lives. Sooner or later, the jagged edges of this broken world will enter our lives. The real question is not if, or even when, but how? How will be respond to the brokenness? By fighting a futile fight in the hopes that we can somehow change the inevitable?  By ignoring the pain, or burying it deep down? Or by greeting these challenges with openness and love, knowing that in the end, they are opportunities for transformation?

This is also why we all gather here year after year on Yom Kippur. Because the challenges, the changes, the transformation of the past year still weigh heavily upon us. A year yet to be revealed lies before us. What else can we do but send our prayers and hopes and dreams for another year of life, of health, of peace?

But at the same we know that despite our prayers, it will be for us a year of challenges and losses both large and small.  That’s why we say every year, when we pray the Unetaneh Tokef: “U’teshuvah, U’tefillah, U’tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’ah ha’gezeyrah.” “Repentance, prayer and tzedakah lessen the severity of the decree.”  When we sing out these words every year, I can’t help but think of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai’s consoling words to Rabbi Joshua: “No we’ve lost the Temple, and that is a huge loss indeed. But we need not despair. Because we still have the power to bring holiness to our lives and to our world through other forms of sacred action: through love, through kindness, through acts of mercy. And these actions will always hold the key to our redemption.”

This, more than anything, is why I seem to keep returning again and again to this amazing story. Because it teaches me the most Jewish of lessons: despair is not an option. No matter how painful the challenges or how cataclysmic the losses that enter our lives. Our tradition is a tradition of hope in the future. Not a future we can predict, or necessarily even the future we would ideally wish for ourselves, but still the future that is ours’ to claim. If, like the good rabbi, we choose to respond to the all of life with open arms.

May we all be blessed with a year of life, health and peace.

Amen.

If the Torah teaches us that human beings are made in the image of God, which image of God will we proclaim? The God of fear or the God of forgiveness? The God of hatred or the God of compassion? The God of xenophobia or the God of justice? And if our answer is indeed the latter, then we must affirm it. We must bear witness to this image of God in no uncertain terms. History teaches all too well what the God of hatred can do in our world. Those of us who reject this theology must be ready to do so without hesitation – to actively promote the God of compassion.

Click below to read the entire sermon:

Those who come to Torah study will know this phenomenon well: we’re reading our weekly portion, I’ll share a rabbinic insight or two, things will be going along quite nicely…

… and then we’ll read a passage where God behaves really, really badly.

It occurs almost on a weekly basis. Out of nowhere God will act like an abusive parent or a jealous crusher of other gods, or as angrily punishing authority figure. And inevitably, our discussion flies off in a very familiar direction: this is my most sacred of texts? This is the God Jews are being asked to worship? This is the God I’m supposed to teach to my children?

It’s often even more confusing because there are also times in the Torah where God appears as the epitome of tolerance and compassion: the God that liberates the enslaved, who cares for the sick, who shows kindness and loyalty throughout the generations. This God usually prompts far less discussion – except perhaps for the comment that we wish God could always appear this way in the Torah.

To make matters even more confusing, sometimes these two Gods will appear back to back within the very same Torah portion. In Parashat Ki Tisa, for instance, we read the infamous incident of the Golden Calf.  In response to this act of disloyalty, God becomes infuriated and threatens to wipe all of the Israelites. Though Moses eventually gets God to back down, God later sends a plague upon the people as punishment.

A little later on, however, God is appears to have reformed completely. When God passes by Moses on the top of Mt. Sinai, God’s essential divine attributes are described: “compassionate and slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin.”

So which God is the real God? The punishing authority figure or the unconditionally loving parent? The angry warrior who demands that we crush the inhabitants of Canaan or the compassionate exemplar who commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves?

As I grapple with this question, myself, I’ve come to accept that whether we like it or not, both of these “Gods” represent aspects of our tradition. As much as we’d like to, we can’t wish away or surgically excise the nasty God from our sacred texts. On the contrary: if we really intend to be serious about Jewish spiritual life, I believe we need to be prepared to confront the more disturbing theologies in our tradition.

For me that means asking this question openly and unflinchingly: if the Torah teaches us that human beings are made in the image of God, which image of God will we proclaim? The God of fear or the God of forgiveness? The God of hatred or the God compassion? The God of xenophobia or the God of justice? And if our answer is indeed the latter, then we must affirm it. We must bear witness to this image of God in no uncertain terms. History teaches all too well what the God of hatred can do in our world. Those of us who reject this theology must be ready to do so without hesitation – to actively promote the God of compassion.

Of course, this is not only a Jewish problem – it’s a challenge to all people of faith. I’m often struck that Judaism is routinely stereotyped as the religion of the “intolerant Old Testament God” and Christianity as the religion of the “merciful New Testament God.” If truth be told, Christianity has been as responsible as any other faith for bringing religious intolerance into the world. No, this is not the problem of any one religion. It’s a universal challenge. At the end of the day, religion is only as redemptive or destructive as the human beings who practice it.

Last year I taught an Adult Ed series at JRC called “God Talk” – and the central premise of the class was that Jewish tradition does not have a central theological dogma.  Jewish theology has always evolved as Jewish history has evolved. The God concepts of the Bible, for instance, differ that the Rabbinic theologies of the Talmud, which in turn differs from the God of the medieval philosopher Maimonides or the Lurianic kabbalists, or modernist theologians, etc.

Any one of these theologies is important and edifying as far it goes, but in the end, I believe the continuum they represent is much more important.  We can learn a great deal by studying the tensions between these views of God, because I think ultimately these contradictory concepts reflect our own struggles to live up to our highest selves. I guess all this is my fancy way of saying that in the end, I’m not so interested in having a theologian tell me what God is. Like Jacob, I believe that God is meant to be personally wrestled with – not studied in a theology book.

In this regard, I want to share with you a taste of what I consider to be among the most exciting theological work being done today. Interestingly enough, it’s not being created by philosophers or theologians, but actually by scientists and neurologists. Over the past decade or so, physicians have been investigating the ways in which spirituality is rooted in the biology of the brain. By combining the fields of neuroscience and religious studies, they’re helping us to actually understand how the neurological makeup of our brains influences the ways we experience God.

I’ve been particularly fascinated by the research of radiologist Dr. Andrew Newberg, who is the founder of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. I first discovered his work several years ago when I read the book, “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.”  This is Dr. Newberg’s basic premise:

Every event that happens to us or any actions that we take can be associated with activity in one or more specific regions of the brain. This includes, necessarily, all religious and spiritual experiences. The evidence further compels us to believe that if God does indeed exist, the only place he can manifest his existence would be in the tangled neural pathways and physiological structures of the brain.

Of course philosophers have held for centuries that our perception of reality is just that: our “perception.” There is no such thing as a “direct,” “objective” experience of reality.  In the field of religious studies, social scientists have been helping us understand the ways we construct our religious realities; today, physical scientists are increasingly weighing in on the God question as well.  As they are finding, the more we learn about how our brains perceive reality, the more we learn about how and why God is revealed to us.

For me, the most amazing findings of this research demonstrate the way God has evolved neurologically over the centuries. In his newest book, “How God Changes Your Brain,” Newberg makes the claim that different experiences of God actually correlate to the development of the human brain. Neurologically speaking, researchers have located the angry, authoritarian God in the limbic system, which houses the oldest and most primitive structures of the brain. This includes the amygdala – the little almond-shaped organ that generates our “fight or flight” response. The benevolent, compassionate God, on the other hand, can be found in our frontal lobes, and particularly in a structure known as the anterior cingulate. These are the parts of the brain most primarily associated with our experience of compassion and empathy. Compared to the ancient limbic system, these structures are the most recently evolved parts of our brain and they appear to be unique to human beings.

This is how Newberg puts it:

Something happened in the brains of our ancestors that gave us the power to tame this authoritarian God. No one knows exactly when or how it happened, but the neural structures that evolved enhanced our ability to cooperate with others. They gave us the ability to construct language and to consciously think in logical and reasonable ways…Without these new neural connections, humans would be limited in their ability to develop an inner moral code or a societal system of ethics.

And so the $64,000 question: does this research teach us how we can keep the more destructive God at bay?  Can we actually train our brains to favor the God of compassion?  Newberg answers this question by quoting a classic Cherokee folktale:

Once upon a time a young Indian boy received a beautiful drum as a gift. When his best friend saw it, he asked if he could play with it, but the boy felt torn. He didn’t want to share his new present, so he angrily told his friend, “No!” His friend ran away, and the boy sat down on a rock by a stream to contemplate his dilemma. He hated the fact that he had hurt his friend’s feelings, but the drum was too precious to share. In his quandary, he went to his grandfather for advice.

The elder listened quietly and then replied. “I often feel as though there are two wolves fighting inside me. One is means and greedy and full of arrogance and pride, but the other is peaceful and generous. All the time they are struggling, and you, my boy, have those same two wolves inside of you.”

“Which one will win” asked the boy.

The elder smiled and said, “The one you feed.”

Newberg suggests that much like the two wolves, there are two Gods competing with one another deep within our brains: the authoritarian, punishing God vs. the compassionate forgiving God. Which one will win? It all depends upon which one we feed.  Indeed, neurological research demonstrates that whenever we let our anger or fear overpower us, we tend to shut down the brain activity in our frontal lobes. When this happens, our “fight or flight” response is generated and it spreads rapidly throughout our brains.

We’ve long known that excessive anger or fear can cause problems like high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Studies also show that extreme anger can permanently disrupt structures in both our brains that control basic functions like memory storage and cognitive accuracy. In other words, when we indulge our anger, we feed the more ancient, authoritarian God.

When I read this research, I’m reminded of the central divine attributes in Torah known as “erech apayim” – being “slow to anger.” It also brings to my mind the famous dynamic between the Yetzer Hara (“the bad inclination”) and the Yetzer Hatov (“the good inclination.”) The rabbis made sure to point out that the Yetzer Harah was an essential aspect of our humanity. Whether we like it or not, these impulses are a part of us – much like our limbic system is an essential and necessary part of our brain. The point is not to deny or repress our Yetzer Hara, but to channel and master it. As the verse from Pirke Avot teaches: “Mi hu gibor? Mi’she kovesh et yitzro” – “Who is mighty? The one who masters one’s (bad) inclination.”

And how do we feed the God of compassion? At the risk of sounding too Pollyannaish, the answer is really quite simple: we need to consciously exercise our capacity for kindness. Believe it or not, science itself is proving that compassion and empathy can be neurologically contagious. Studies demonstrate conclusively that there is increased activity in the compassion center of the brain whenever we perceive others as being sensitive to our needs. Scientists have also concluded through research that the more positive contact we have with members of other different religions, cultural, and ethnic groups, the less prejudice we tend to harbor in our brains.

Another very effective way to feed the God of compassion is through the practice of meditation and contemplation. Many of you know, I’m sure that back in the 1970’s Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard presented his first findings on what he called “The Relaxation Response,” demonstrating the power of meditation to reduce stress and lower our “fight or flight” response. More recent studies have shown that the meditation can enhance the neural functioning of the brain enough to impact its capacity for empathy, openness to different points of view, and tolerance for those who are different.

I want to say that up until now, I’ve been referring somewhat flippantly to these two different Gods.  I don’t want anyone to think that I’m a theological dualist – that I’m reducing the world essentially a battle between a force of good and a force of evil. What I am suggesting is that what we call God is something we perceive on a continuum – we experience a more ancient, primitive God concept at one end, and a more evolved, exalted form at the other. I would suggest that God isn’t really identified with either one of these poles, but rather in the forward momentum that moves us from one end of the continuum to the other.

And the way we attain this forward motion – the key to living a sacred way of life – is the same as it ever was: by mastering our baser impulses and nurturing our most exalted selves. By refusing to indulge our fear and anger and opting instead to feed our capacity for kindness and compassion. By being actively involved in the care and feeding of God’s growth in ourselves and in our world.  This is how we ultimately make God manifest in the world.

I can’t help but think that this is yet another way might understand the Torah’s concept of Tzelem Elohim – the Divine Image. Perhaps our innate neurological capacity to grow in compassion, to empathize with others, to exercise kindness, to promote fairness and justice for people we might not even know personally – maybe this is all just science’s way of saying that we’re all made in God’s image.

It seems somehow appropriate to be having this discussion on Yom Kippur: the day in which we pray openly and unabashedly for God’s compassion in the coming year.  Perhaps on a very real level, this could mean that we are praying for the strength to grow the capacity for goodness in ourselves. To find the wherewithal to feed our capacity for kindness, to make the time to calm our minds and souls so that we might become vessels for compassion in our own lives. Because then, and only then will our prayers have a chance of coming true.

On this Yom Kippur, may we all find a measure of kindness in our lives. May it make all the difference for us, for those around us, and for our world.

Amen.

Is there a place in Judaism for pacifism? Is it in fact possible – or desirable – as a Jew, to walk the path of nonviolence?

Click below to read my answers…

Whenever Jewish tradition’s views on War and Peace are being discussed, you’ll often hear some version of this statement: “Judaism is not a pacifist religion.”  I’ve made this claim myself on more than one occasion.  In fact, before I begin this year’s sermon, I’d like to read you an excerpt from the sermon I gave on Rosh Hashanah, 2003.   If you think back on that time, you’ll remember: 9/11 was still fresh on our souls, the war with Iraq had begun a few months earlier, and I had decided to make a sharp statement against our nation’s increasingly militaristic foreign policy.

I’ll quote from my sermon verbatim:

I suppose the place to start is to point out that Judaism in not a pacifist tradition and it never has been. From its Israelite origins until present day, Jewish tradition has viewed war as something that is occasionally permitted and in some circumstances, even necessary.

Now, I’m not here to retract this statement. But I would like to explore it a bit more deeply.  I’d like to revisit this comment because I’m increasingly struck by how easily Jews stereotype pacifism – how we tend to set it up as a kind of over-idealistic straw horse that we can easily knock aside.  And in the end, I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. Because when we dismiss the work of nonviolence, I fear that we end up becoming jaded and cynical over the very prospect of peace itself.

It’s now six years since I’ve given that sermon, but I believe the issue is germane as ever. As 2009 draws to a close, our country is still engaged in two foreign wars, neither of which show any sign of ending soon. Though our new administration is now making what I consider to be valiant attempts at diplomacy, the challenges are daunting and the prospects for failure are terrifying, particularly in the Middle East.  In so many ways, the threat – and the tragedy – of war is still very much a part of our times.

And yet perhaps it ever was thus. It would be foolish to deny that war has been an indelible aspect of human history from time immemorial.  Though most of us consider peacemaking to be an important value, it’s a value we seldom honor all that well. War is what we know. It’s what we’ve always known. The pursuit of nonviolence is also a part of our history, certainly, and we love to invoke it from time to time – but I’d say we rarely stop to consider it seriously. When push comes to shove, most of us consider pacifism at best to be a lovely, if somewhat naïve little dream. We’re great at paying it lip service, but how often do we seriously consider its meaning? How often do we really, truly attempt to walk the walk?

The way we commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a prime example of this phenomenon. Truly, there are few more beloved and celebrated contemporary national heroes than Martin Luther King. Indeed, we’ve devoted a national holiday to his memory and he is taught in our schools nearly as much as our country’s founding fathers. But rarely during our annual MLK celebrations do we explore how his sophisticated and challenging philosophy of nonviolence informed the struggle for civil rights in our country.

On MLK day, we’ll inevitably hear his “I Have a Dream” speech quoted repeatedly. But I doubt our nation would ever invoke – let alone seriously conisder – a quote such as this, which he wrote in an article shortly before he was assassinated:

I’m committed to nonviolence absolutely. I’m just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here. I’m not going to burn down any building. If nonviolent protest fails this summer, I will continue to preach it and teach it…I plan to stand by nonviolence because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, with my own self. I will still be faithful to nonviolence.

So as a Jew who is also deeply inspired by teachings such as this – as someone who struggles to remain faithful to these kinds of values, I ask: is there a place in Judaism for pacifism? Is it in fact possible – or desirable – as a Jew, to walk the path of nonviolence?

I’d like to start out by clarifying our terms.  Up until now I’ve been using the terms “pacifism” and “nonviolence” somewhat interchangeably, but I should be more precise. Generally speaking, the term “pacifism” refers to a psychological state or a state of mind. Pacifism is a value, an ideal – a moral belief that rejects war and violence as a means for resolving conflict. 

Nonviolence, on the other hand, is a way of life. I think one of the biggest misconceptions about nonviolence is that is essentially passive. Perhaps this is because the term defines itself by what it isn’t. In fact, nonviolence is inherently activist.  In truth, it is actually as active as violence itself inasmuch as they are both forms of persuasion.  They both seek to change or transform the status quo. Nonviolence is essentially rooted in essentially a pragmatic approach – but it is committed to resolving conflicts peacefully. It is based on the core belief that is eminently practical in nature: that nonviolence is simply more effective than violence. That war does not work.

This idea is, in fact, deeply embedded in Judaism.  Through the maze of Jewish tradition’s myriad of confusing and often seemingly contradictory commandments, we are repeatedly reminded that Torah’s essential purpose is peace. Every time we return the Torah scroll to the ark we do so with these Biblical words, “Torah is a Tree of Life… all its ways are ways of peace.” The Talmud (Chapter Gittin) drives this idea home in a very straightforward manner: “The whole of Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

 But peace, we are taught, must be continually sought – it will not come naturally to us.  In Psalm 34, another important part of our liturgy, we read “Seek peace and pursue it.” In Pirke Avot, Rabbi Hillel teaches, “Be students of Aaron: love peace and pursue peace.” Now these are lovely words, but they are more than just moral platitudes. Over and over in our tradition we are taught that  peace is not simply a value to be cherished – it is a goal to be actively sought out. Peace will not, it cannot come to us all by itself. Peace will only come to us if we ourselves see fit to work for it. Otherwise, war and bloodshed will continue to be our default status quo.

Those who deny pacifist values in Jewish tradition often point to its complex laws of warfare. And it’s true: Jewish law spends a great deal of time discussing when we are and aren’t justified in going to war. In halacha, this is embodied by the concept of Milchemet Mitzvah (or a “commanded war.”) Under this category are two instances in which we are literally obliged to go to war. One is the commandment to fight the so-called seven pagan nations that occupied the ancient Land of Israel as well as the enemy tribe known as the Amalekites.  What do we make of this commandment today? Many Jewish commentators suggest that this category belongs to an ancient Near Eastern setting that is simply no more. That is to say, since these nations no longer exist, this particular commandment is now null and void.

However, the rabbis also applied the concept of Milchemet Mitzvah to any war of self-defense. A famous law from the Talmud rules that a one is commanded to kill a pursuer (“rodef”) who is threatening your life.  So too are nations given the responsibility to defend themselves against who attack them.  However – and this is a big however – before we go to war, we are commanded to seek peace at all costs – to exhaust every possibility for peaceful resolutions to conflict.

That is because war and violence have an irrevocable impact on our lives and on our world. Another classic Jewish teaching, the Mechilta of Rabbi Ishmael, teaches: “When an arrow leaves the hand of a warrior he cannot take it back.”  From this we learn that once we resort to war, we unleash a myriad of consequences that we can neither control nor reverse.

Jewish tradition also teaches us that violence is a form of moral pollution that stains our world indelibly.  The most famous example of this occurs in Genesis. After Cain kills Abel, God says to him “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” I understand this to mean that when the violence does not only cause personal suffering and loss – it transforms our collective world forever. 

Indeed, war has a way of unleashing hatred into the world in a profound and indelible manner. It invariably creates cycle of violence that compound pain and division – and by so doing these cycles render the prospect of peace infinitely more difficult, if not impossible.  This is the tragic irony of war: it is virtually always justified in terms of self defense. But inevitably, war creates an endless reality of its own in which each side ends up defining the other in terms of its latest attack.

An orthodox rabbinic colleague once put it this way to me: “According to Jewish law, a Milchemet Mitzvah – a commanded war – is a war of self defense. That essentially means that war is always justified or war is never justified.”  With all due respect to “just war” theory, I tend to agree with my colleague. It often seems so very ironic that war, the most extreme and horrific manifestation of human violence, also tends to be the easiest for us to excuse, rationalize and explain away. But those who have fought in wars will attest that there is nothing moral or good about them. According to international law, there are “legal” and “illegal” ways of waging them, but most who actually see the field of battle report that in the fog of war, the fine points of battlefield morality invariably become blurred, often to the point of meaninglessness.

Though I respect the opinions of those who feel otherwise, I have personally come to believe that the shades of gray are merely a delusion. At the end of the day we will have to choose: do we believe that war is an acceptable way to settle conflicts, or do we believe that it is simply unacceptable? And if our answer is the latter, then what are we prepared to do about it?

I know that this is an enormously difficult issue for Jews in particular. I think there is a good reason why you rarely hear the words “Judaism” and “pacifism” mentioned together – and I’m not sure it has ultimately has anything to do with religious ideology. We Jews have been a historically vulnerable people. We’ve been the literal object of violence for centuries. And of course there is no getting around it: to be a Jew today means to live in traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust – to know all too painfully the costs of not being able to physically defend ourselves. I know this is why Israel represents what it does for so many Jews. In a very deep way, it represents our Jewish empowerment after having been so vulnerable for so long – and especially following the most tragically powerless chapters in our history. For the first time in centuries, we now have their own nation with their own army, prepared and ready to defend the security of the Jewish people.

But now, sixty years after the founding of Israel, it is well worth asking: has Israel solved what Theodor Herzl called “the Jewish problem?”  When Herzl developed political Zionism, he truly believed that the founding of a Jewish state would end anti-Semitism once and for all. And yet, for all its formidable, state-of-the-art military might, Israel has found neither safety nor security. This is the great tragic irony of our time: the place in the world where the Jewish people is ostensibly the most powerful is the place where endless war has become its lot.  Of course, we could analyze the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and debate its causes as long as we like, but again, the larger question remains: has Israel’s military power brought the Jewish people the peace and stability for which we have prayed for so long?

Many of you know that I speak out very publicly when I believe Israel uses its power in a manner that I consider oppressive – and I know it is difficult for many in the Jewish community to hear me criticize Israel in such a public way.  There will be time to debate into the specifics of the Mideast conflict – and as a congregation we should.  We should share openly and honestly our beliefs, our concerns and our fear over this painful and challenging and tragic situation. But for now I will only say that when I speak out, please know I do it as a matter of personal conscience. I do so out of a deep and abiding love for the Jewish people. And I do so out my belief that the use of overwhelming military power to solve political problems is not making Israel more secure, but precisely the opposite.

Frankly, I believe the same thing about the US and our own militarized foreign policy as well. Believe me, I have no illusions about the so-called military-industrial complex (or as it’s often referred to today: the “corporate-industrial complex.”)  This is how the world works. War today is big business. It has been observed that war will be with us as long as there are those who can make good money off of it. I’m not so naïve as to say we are going to fundamentally turn around the scourge of war from our midst. But I do also know that history is replete with examples in which nonviolence has stared down the advocates of war and violence and have succeeded. It is not just a naïve dream. People such as Ghandi and King and Mandela are the most prominent examples of this, but there are many, many more heroes who have changed the world in large and small ways through the path of nonviolence.

And for those who scoff that ivory tower morals can never change the scheme of things, I submit the words of Vaclav Havel, the Czech essayist and playwright who helped to bring down an oppressive regime and eventually became President:

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Does Judaism believe in nonviolence?  For me, at least, it comes down to this: I believe that our spiritual tradition teaches that the pursuit of peace is an absolutely sacrosanct value; that this is an ideal that we are commanded to put into action, and that it does indeed have the power to change the world. I also know that it is enormously challenging to belong to people with a legacy of victimization – and remain committed to a path of nonviolence.  But today, in this age of unprecedented Jewish power, I also believe in my heart that physical power will not ultimately bring us the security that we seek. And in my darkest moments, I fear that, God forbid, it could even prove our downfall.

As I mentioned last night, Rosh Hashanah is a time in which we publicly ackowledge the limits of human power – the one time of year in which we literally bow to the ground to a Power that ultimately transcends us all. I’ve often believe that in its way, this is an ironically empowering moment. For its only when we affirm the limits of our own power that we understand what we are truly capable of in this world. I hope this Rosh Hashanah, we can begin to discover the true source of our power: not by wielding it against others, but by choosing another means of affecting change in the world:  the path of nonviolence, which is just as effective, but infinitely more sacred.

I hope it is a path we can search for and struggle toward together. May it make a difference in our lives and world – and may we all live to see that day.