After 50 Years— Living Jewish, Loud and Proud Erev Rosh Hashana 5786/2025
Last June I celebrated the 50th year of my rabbinic ordination.
There was no Office Party, I was not presented with a gold watch for my years of service. I supposed I could have called fellow ordainees from the Class of ’75, we could have met for round of beers—except there’s no one in the area for me to call, and most of those still alive I haven’t spoken to in some time.
What I’m saying is that there was not much fanfare—actually there was no fanfare. Barb congratulated the both of us for successfully navigating the years unscathed, intact and still happily together. Our kids called, amazed that it’s really been all of 50 years. And I did get a call from the temple secretary of my first congregation in Indiana, still there after all this time, telling me that I was always her favorite. June came and went, and in this 51st year I’m doing pretty much the same rabbi-things even after retiring from full-time in the congregation, but I’m doing a whole lot less of them. As June came and went, I found myself thinking about what I’ve learned in all these years.
After ordination our first congregation was in St. Louis. I was the third rabbi of over 1500 families. And since most folks there didn’t care so much about what the third rabbi said or did, I quietly went about my business and watched and listened and learned. And three years later, we moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, a city of about 70,000 and a congregation of 120 families who cared very much what their rabbi said and did. And because we were the only Jewish presence within three counties-- I was probably the only rabbi, maybe the only Jew, most in Terre Haute would meet during my 16 years there.
Because it never occurred to me to blend quietly and discreetly into the background of the community, I sought out the local clergy group and announced my presence. Not surprisingly some were not too pleased with the prospect of a Jew joining them. But I was not going away, and after a few friendly, but challenging discussions over the apparent messianic predictions in the “Old Testament”, those few that I seem to have offended chose to leave, and the rest of us went on our merry way becoming the very best of friends. I learned then that standing up for oneself, for one’s tradition and heritage, though never at the expense or degradation of others is what others most respect, and which make for honest and open and long-lasting relationships.
In Terre Haute, folks generally knew that Jews were there and were happy that we were there. There were a few Jewish physicians, attorneys, and assorted white collar workers-- but for the most part, folks knew Jews from downtown main street which was populated by small and large Jewish businesses, from mom-and-pops to the one large department store.
Though my rabbinic priority was seeing to the needs of my congregation, as the only professional and public Jew it was also my responsibility to protect my community by maintaining and strengthening our presence within the dominant Christian culture. My acceptance, involvement and public presence with local clergy colleagues afforded me opportunities to become known in the community. I was asked to join the hospital’s Ethics Committee. I was invited to the board and later elected President of the regional Planned Parenthood agency. I taught at both Indiana State University and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. And our synagogue became known as an interesting, stimulating and worthwhile place to bring school and church groups. And in addressing our visitors’ obvious and expected religious questions it only helped that I was well-informed and conversant in the New Testament and Early Christian history.
And in all those 16 years we never once had an anti-Semitic call or threat or protest or spray paint incident. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that in a small-town you don’t pick on or go after an acknowledged and recognized community group. We may have been in the background of an otherwise thoroughly Christian culture, but we were legitimately part of the community, commercially certainly, but religiously as well, and as one of my members was told: “Your rabbi stands toe-to-toe, and side-by-side with our Protestant and Catholic clergy.”
And yes, the times were very different then. It was a small town, and there was no Muslim or pro-Palestinian presence. Israel was still David fighting Arab Goliaths, the Six Days War was still in recent memory. “Back home in Indiana. . . on the banks of the Wabash” they apparently had not heard of or had disremembered Henry Ford’s notorious Dearborn Independent which warned that Jewish communists, who were also capitalists, were a threat to Western Civilization. And there were no national leaders or television personalities or podcasts hell bent on fracturing our country into those who are real Americans and those who are enemies of the state and a menace to our very existence.
But now, years later, the Jewish community is in a very different social, cultural and political environment.
It was not so long ago that the conservative right and the liberal left praised the Zionist enterprise in Israel as a bulwark against Muslim terrorism. Israel was our great ally in the war against jihad, the only real democracy in the Middle East. When in November 1975 the United Nations General Assembly declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” America (for the most part) was united in her support of Israel, not only in Washington and on Wall Street, but on Main Street and campus quads and in university classrooms. These days, not so much.
Now I am no fan of the current Israeli government, as I assume most of you know. I have only disdain for the way Israeli Arabs and Reform and Conservative Jews are deprived of their social, civil and for us, religious rights. And I seethe in anger at the behavior of the West Bank Settlement community. But to decry the immoral actions of the Israeli government in Gaza as evidence, as proof, of the malice and malevolence of Zionism, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Zionism is bigger than the appalling behavior of the Israeli government, it is an idea, a moral imperative, and a national right.
And what we see today in the streets, on campuses, in spray-painted graffiti, in so many attacks on Jews and synagogues-- is anti-Semitism plain and simple. It is a kind of Jew-hate that seemed to have disappeared a a generation ago but apparently was festering underground, an infection just beneath the surface, just waiting, like the troll beneath the bridge, to jump out and swallow us up. And most appalling, at least to me in ways so personally hurtful, are so many national Protestant assemblies who denounce Israel and its apartheid colonialist imperial Zionist agenda. Where are those who once were our friends?
Those on the political and religious far right were never on our side: the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and radical nationalist hate groups. They’ve raised their ugly heads most recently immediately after the shooting of Charlie Kirk--
As I said before, even many of our friends in the moderate center and liberal left, who were always with us—no longer are. Collectively we were “Catholic, Protestant, Jew”, melted in the American pot, the epitome of America’s successful democratic demonstration of “freedom of faith”. But at the most recent biennial of the Presbyterian Church USA the delegates reaffirmed their position singling out Israel for “animus, fixation, double standards and demonization.” One of their biennial leaders declared “Israel is an apartheid state. There is a growing consensus in the church that we shouldn’t be profiting from Israel’s human rights abuses and, frankly, genocide against Palestinians.” Apparently, Zionism still equals racism, which is still Jew-hate.
On college campuses not so long ago we thrived. The “Jewish presence” was praised and promoted in their marketing materials. Now Jewish university presidents have been removed from office because they’ve not “sufficiently suppressed anti-Semitism”. Jewish students are reportedly withdrawing from their universities for schools which offer them protection. And anti-Semitism itself has disgracefully become weaponized by this government with the one singular purpose of attacking liberal educational institutions. I ask: “Sir, have you no shame?”
Just this summer another traditional Jewish ally turned against us. In July, the National Education Association used its annual conference to adopt a measure that effectively would prevent the union’s teachers from “using, endorsing or publicizing” any educational materials created by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL’s peer-reviewed programs have for many years helped educators teach students the dangers of bias and prejudice. The ADL developed and distributes “Echoes and Reflections,” a well-known, highly-praised program that includes lessons on the Holocaust. And the ADL’s “No Place for Hate,” is a student-led program used in more than 2,000 schools every year. Its classroom content and extracurricular activities offer a message of inclusion that is entirely apolitical. It’s designed solely to bring students together to better understand the differences that too often divide us.
The NEA’s move to eliminate these programs was not really about the ADL. It was a clear and unambiguous statement to Jewish educators, Jewish parents and children that they can be replaced. The NEA activists that pushed the resolution at the convention did not identify any single or specific problem with the ADL curricula. They did not question the pedagogic approach. They did not gather data from the thousands of schools using the ADL programs. They did, however, have an issue with ADL’s outspoken condemnation of today’s anti-Semitism. They did however have an issue with the ADL’s continuing commitment to Zionism, and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
Now I’m not always a fan of the ADL. They are occasionally, in my opinion, excessively over-the-top in their public protestations. But I am certainly supportive of their programs, and especially the K-12 curricula they offer to our public and private schools. This is only another example of our former friends on the center and left echoing this increasing and pervasive anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist rhetoric. Said one NEA delegate to that conference: “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil-fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change”. Think for a moment on how incredibly perverse that statement is: “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil-fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change”.
However, the action of the NEA activists was rejected and reversed weeks later when the leadership of the NEA voted to overrule the conference resolution, no doubt in response to hundreds of protests from schools, educators and national Jewish organizations. In doing so, the NEA leadership belatedly recognized “a growing level of antisemitic activity [among its members] to marginalize mainstream Jewish voices within the nation’s public school system.”
When I became a professional Jew fifty years ago, and set up shop in a small Indiana city, I knew that my primary responsibility was to serve the religious and educational and pastoral needs of my congregation. But it would also be my responsibility to represent them out in the community as a legitimate and authentic member of the local clergy, and the congregation’s honest, truthful and responsive rabbi. The only way it felt right for me was to stand up “loud and proud” with my families, and to the community-at-large.
After fifty years, after so much has changed, after we are no longer “Catholic, Protestant Jew”, equal among equals, allied with the left in fighting the radical right. This I know: our community and each of us personally, must often and openly, dramatically stand up loud and proud declaring we are here and we belong here. We must loudly and proudly refuse to let others define us as “other”, we must call out former friends who have been brainwashed by those who have for their own profit and benefit declared us to be racists.
Fifty years seems like forever ago—but 2000 years ago Hillel said
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
As American Jews we have with good cause become anxious and ill-at-ease, even fearful because we are ‘Jewish’ Americans! But we cannot allow ourselves to become the boogeyman that others would have us be and need us to be.
Anti-Semitism, whether disguised as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist or anti-war or pro-Palestinian has become a nationalized weaponized cudgel to beat down free-speech, liberal values, diversity, equality and inclusion. It is Jew-hate however it is disguised. I have never, in my 50 years as a rabbi looked over my American shoulder fearful of what might come next; I have never thought of myself, by nature or persuasion, as particularly paranoid. On the other hand, I’ve never said “It can’t happen here”, though I have always thought America was different.
In the 1950’s, Walt Kelly’s Pogo said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”. Indeed “the enemy is us” because we have put those in power who do and will use anti-Semitism to further their own ends. We were told, we were warned that this kind of chaos would result, and we did it anyway.
Our friends are few and far between, and we will need them if we are to de-weaponize the cudgel of anti-Semitism. I believe we still have friends out there, and that we will find them if you and I stand loud and proud, and if together, we all stand up for the soul of America.
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
We can only hope for a shana tova.
After Fifty Years—On Being Remembered Rosh Hashana 5786/2025
This past June 6 marked the 50th anniversary of my ordination from Hebrew Union College.
Two years earlier, in the summer of 1973, Barb and I were in the heart of Mississippi, working at the Reform Movement’s Regional summer camp. A rabbinic student then, I was the camp’s program director and Barb ran the office. I remember vividly the opening day of the first session: cars would drive in through the gates, the backseat doors would burst open with eager and excited campers—some anxiously looking for old friends, others a bit overwhelmed by so much activity. My job that day was to welcome each car, introduce myself, answer any questions and direct them to parking and registration.
As I finished instructing one parent, their little boy, probably eight or nine years old, slipped out of the car and walked up to me saying, with a thick southern drawl “Excuse me sir—are all of these folks Jews?” I told him yes. “All o’them?” he asked, pointing to a hundred or so milling parents and campers and counselors. “All of them” I told him. “I can’t believe it” he said softly, “I’ve never seen so many Jews, all in one place.”
A few weeks into camp one of our counselors came to me with a request. In her cabin of 14-year-olds, a girl from a small town in Tennessee has expressed her regret at not celebrating her Bat Mitzvah. There was no synagogue in her town, the nearest was Knoxville a couple hours away and her family only went there for the High Holidays. She had heard this summer about her campmates’ Bat Mitzvah experiences. The counselor wanted to know if we could “do her Bat Mitzvah” here at camp, and since she’d be staying through the second session, we had six weeks to prepare.
I met with her every day after lunch during rest hour. We started with the Aleph-Bet, added some grammar and translation, and then worked directly on the Hebrew of the portion that would be read on the camp’s last Shabbat. And on that morning, she did beautifully. All of us were very proud of her. It was a wonderful way for the camping summer to end.
Twenty-two years later, in November of 1995, I was attending the National Biennial of the UAHC (now the URJ-- Union of Reform Judaism) which was meeting in Atlanta. I have always been impressed by the national biennials that bring thousands of Reform Jews together for a long weekend of speakers, classes and congregational discussions. At that Atlanta Convention, with well over 3000 participants and at every biennial, I thought how amazing it was that there were so many Reform Jews in one place, each time recalling the wonder and wide eyes of that camper arriving at our Mississippi camp.
And on the last day of the convention, a woman came up to me and introduced herself. She was my 14-year-old camp Bat Mitzvah student, now 22 years older. Grown, married with children, elected to the board of her Atlanta congregation, she was a delegate to the Biennial. She had been looking for me, hoping that I would be attending. She told me that the summer of her Bat Mitzvah had changed her Jewish life. From a marginally and quietly Jewish, little girl in Bristol Tennessee—here she was, a representative of her congregation at the national convention of the Reform Movement. She said that she’d been waiting a long time to thank me for changing her Jewish life. Excited, she wanted her husband and kids to meet me and was hoping that we could get together that day, the Sunday that the biennial ended. We never did meet up and we’ve not spoken since. One never knows what little thing, what small gift of time or effort, will change a life. And had she not found me in Atlanta, I would not have known what I had given her.
Fifteen years ago a married couple came to Temple Emanu-El for Friday services but didn’t enter the building. Neither one was Jewish, but they thought that maybe Judaism would be what they wanted for themselves. Not knowing, and somewhat fearful of what these Jews would say to strangers, they sat in their car, debated whether to go in, and eventually drove off. They were back the next Friday night, and again sat in their car watching folks go into the building, and compounded their distress as they went back and forth: ‘what if we do something wrong?’, but ‘what have we got to lose?’, but ‘what if we embarrass ourselves?’, and ‘what if they don’t want us?’ And again they drove away. The third week, they told themselves that this was silly. What could the Jews inside, do or say that was worse than what they were doing to themselves? So they entered the building and walked into the sanctuary.
Telling me their story a week later sitting in my office, they said that in an instant, their fears vanished when they were met by two ushers in the sanctuary. With smiles they were welcomed and given a service bulletin. They told the ushers “this is our first time.” “Then we’re especially happy to have you with us”, the usher said, and added “if we can help with questions or anything else, we’ll be right here.”
A year later the couple joined Temple Emanu-El on the day of their conversions and immediately volunteered to serve as ushers so that they might personally welcome and make comfortable anyone coming into “their congregation”. The ushers on that one Friday night will never know the magnitude of the impact they had on that couple, or the generational consequences of their warm welcome.
On Yom Kippur specifically but throughout these ten days, our tradition and our prayerbook call for us to reflect and consider our actions of the year just past. I would put a different challenge to you this morning. Instead of looking back, regretting what you did or didn’t do— look ahead and ask yourself ‘what will be my Jewish legacy? For what will I be remembered in my Jewish community, or by the way, out there as a Jew in the community-at-large?’ Last night I spoke about “living Jewish—loud and proud.” We do not know, and we cannot know, the small but meaningful ways we impact others.
On Yom Kippur afternoon our Yizkor names will be read. Hearing them will prompt memories of special people, remembering how each touched our lives. For me, and I assume for you as well, Yizkor is something of a transcendent experience as particular names momentarily lift us beyond the immediacy of the afternoon service. And perhaps, unconsciously, we hope that we will, one day, also be remembered well.
Some of us are fortunate to be in a position to make a difference in the Jewish lives of our GPJC families. But each of us and all of us can have an effect on the future of our community whose intimate nature means that everyone is special and important. Unlike the organizational operations of all those synagogues to our west, everyone here could have a hand in the present well-being and the future of our Council. We are in this together, and what we have is worth leaving a legacy.
But more significant is the personal legacy that is ours to leave as we’re remembered by our family and friends. What will our names engender when read for Yizkor? Rabbinic tradition has it that every person has three names: the names our parents gave us; the names by which we’re known in the community; and most importantly, the name which our own deeds procure for us. (Midrash Tanchuma, Vayakhal 1) And that third name is based not on what other people call us, not by our job titles, but by the kind of person we became.
We want to be remembered, we want to leave something behind, a reminder that indeed we ‘passed this way’. Many think of their children as their tangible, living and breathing, memorials. Some find comfort that their names are engraved on plaques and dedications. But to be “remembered for a blessing”, to be remembered for how we lived and how we touched other lives is most important of all, and is indeed the message of the Yom Kippur Yizkor Memorial.
Many of those names will be remembered for tangible and touchable moments of personal contact, experiences shared, lessons learned. But with others, it’s not what they particularly or explicitly said or did, but rather it’s a lasting memory of how they made us feel. I think of those as emotive memories, which of course could either be warm and comforting, or cold and bitter. And it’s those emotive memories, good or bad, which impact us the most and last the longest. They often come upon us unexpected, they stop us in the present, momentarily lose us in a remembered past as we sense again how they made us feel. When I hear familiar names on the Yizkor and Kaddish lists, and of course family names, time stops for a moment, and I remember.
It’s ironic I think, that more often than not, it’s the memorial list that reminds us of their impact on us, when we suddenly, momentarily are aware of the impression they made. Ironic that, more often than not, it’s after they’ve gone that we most appreciate what they meant to us.
As a youngster going with my parents to Temple on Friday nights, I would eagerly anticipate the moment when, after reading the Kaddish names, the rabbi would always conclude: “Our loved ones live on in the acts of goodness they performed and in the hearts of those they cherished”. I awaited those words because it meant that we would soon go home. For me then, it was just the anticipated catchphrase that signaled the end of the service. But it is, of course, as I came to learn, the very essence of the legacy we hope to leave.
Though we can, for the most part, know how we will be remembered and for what, we can never know the extent to which our passing lives unknowingly impact others. We go about our daily progress through the years unaware of how our simple gestures might make a difference in someone’s day, or mood, or life; or when a friendship means far more to the other person than you had thought; or when just doing one’s job well changes everything for those around you.
We want to be remembered well, and only we can make that happen. My wish this morning is that when that time comes for all of us, may we live on in the acts of goodness we performed and in the hearts of those we cherish.
Connecting the Dots Erev Yom Kippur 2025
This past August the CCAR, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, my Reform rabbinic organization, offered a series of webinars to “help prepare us for the Holidays”. I noted particularly a webcast entitled “Infusing High Holy Day Worship with Creativity.”
Apparently some of my colleagues, or their congregations, believe that their worship services need some “creative infusing”, that they are apparently not satisfying, not fulfilling, the needs of their members. This dissatisfaction is most often expressed as “not spiritually uplifting”. I suppose that had I joined the webcast, I would now know what needs to be “infused”. I have however, always believed that folks come to these Holiday services expecting and wanting a “comfort-experience”-- a reminder and a renewal of what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have always meant to them, that ‘things should be the way things should be!’ And even though I have serious problems with the liturgy of our prayerbook which proclaims an intellectually flawed theology (something I speak on almost every year), the familiarity of the service with its readings, prayers, and music transcend the reality of a theology that doesn’t work for me. (If you want, we can talk more about that tomorrow after the morning service.)
But I do understand and can appreciate the congregational reality that folks seem less and less interested in synagogue worship. And the numbers bear that out. Synagogues struggle to maintain membership. Sanctuaries on Friday evening and Saturday morning seat fewer and fewer Jews. “Unaffiliated” has joined Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Orthodox as a recognized Jewish identification.
That CCAR webcast announcement reminded me of something in my files. It was given to me almost 25 years ago by a Christian colleague, an article from his national organization.
[C]hurch leaders theorize that people [are] leaving churches not because they [are] tired of spirituality, but because they [are] tired of the typical churchy kind of spirituality, tired of the boring, remote, and highly institutionalized forms in which the established churches always [seem] to package the search for God. These people are termed “seekers”: religious free agents, people untethered from conventional church loyalties, human beings hungrily searching in their own ways for a spiritual experience in very personal, immediate, often unconventional…ways. [Congregations Jul/Aug 2001]
This group of “seekers” has become a acknowledged sociological group called SBNR, “Spiritual but not religious”. They have them and we have them, and we’ve been aware of them since the ‘90’s when American Judaism, and Reform in particular, pushed itself along a path of “spiritual renewal”. I watched synagogues innovate their worship with drums and tambourines and dancing in the aisles to an extended Mi Chamocha. Some synagogues thought that making worship more informal, more casual would attract a younger group. And some thought that more upbeat, inventive and modern music should carry the worship and attract these “seekers”.
The search for spirituality seems to have become an annual Jewish pastime in our congregations. And the search has attracted both the most knowledgeable and least knowledgeable of Jews, all of whom have opinions on what does and does not “move them.” Some want worship to primarily touch the senses and some want to engage their rational intellect. Some argue that more “traditional” worship is needed and some want more modernity injected into the service; and some only want the worship that they remember as a child growing up. And each solution declares that it is an “authentic” path to meaningful spiritual uplift.
I remember speaking with a Jewish college student a few years back who had trouble accepting “organized religion”. His Jewish experience in the synagogue left him unsatisfied, and he questioned the necessity of joining a congregation. Synagogue, he said, meant “rules and rituals” which were dull and uninteresting rather than uplifting and inspiring. He didn’t want “religion”, he wanted “spirituality.” He wanted to return to and recapture the fulfilling and enthusiastic Jewish spirit he’d last felt when he was 6 years old, standing in front of the Ark, at his Consecration, clutching his miniature Torah Scroll. With Judaism now uninteresting, he had broadened his search in college to include other faiths, and in Buddhist philosophy he had found, he said “the path of wisdom and unification which brings everything together.” Buddhism he told me did not “postulate a God”, but affirmed a “living force” that united plants, animals and human beings.
This college student was not then, and is not today, alone in both his effort to seek a spiritual path to truth and meaning, and in his discovery of Buddhism. A lot of Jews, it seems, are attracted to Buddhism, particularly Israelis who are turned off by the only organized religion they know— state-sponsored Orthodoxy. They, and some American Jews identify as “Jew-Bu’s”. They’ve rejected Orthodox Judaism and its dry, dictatorial and overbearing demands of ritual and rabbinic law. And they feel abandoned by the uninspired secularism of modern liberal Judaism—thus they are disenchanted by both the traditional right and the liberal left.
I can appreciate the disenchantment, but I don’t know how a congregation might “infuse spirituality” into its worship. And I’m the wrong person to ask! For 50 years, my responsibility in leading worship was to fundamentally focus was on which page we were on, and which reading came next, and if I was ready with the tune for next prayer, or hoping that the cantor knew the next cue. Personal spiritual moments for me, few and far between, were when everyone, together, sang the liturgy, especially the Sh’ma and Mi Chamocha and often the closing song. It was in those moments that I was able to lift my attention from the page, that I felt “lifted” beyond the the immediacy of the moment.
And when I would ask my folks “What’s missing in what we do?” I never got a clear or useable answer. But I did find meaningful a long article by Rabbi Larry Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College, an article that I had paperclipped to the Christian magazine article I already cited. Rabbi Hoffman wrote:
Religions are ways of conceptualizing the entire universe of existence. Spiritual discourse is thus a particular way to live in the world—one that leads us to appreciate things that we would not be conscious of were we to limit ourselves to the way our secular culture describes reality. What makes religions unique is the way they order the world. There are Jewish ways of doing this, as there are Christian and Muslim and Buddhist ways.
Noting Hoffman’s words: “Religion leads us to appreciate things that we would not otherwise be conscious of,” religions then prompt us to refocus on what is really important in our lives. With “spiritual discourse”, he wrote, we might find order, meaning, satisfying fulfillment in one’s human experience.
For those attracted to the mysticism of Kabbalah that “discourse” is learning the secret powers of the universe, to be in touch with the unseen forces that control the realm of destiny and reality, and is primarily an intellectual, textual pursuit. Opposite that is a personal, emotionally moving and sensual “feeling”, loke that which comes when we are touched by music or poetry or art or architecture or nature.
For me however, “spirituality” is a continuing and confirming awareness of a sense above the ordinary and mundane, an awareness that my life not only has order in-and-of-itself but also is in harmony with the greater order of the universe. Rabbi Hoffman suggested that we should think about the process of “spiritual discourse” as a metaphor. And he offers one that works well for me and provides (finally) the focus of this evening’s message.
As a child, I would often occupy myself with activity books. Some of the pages were for coloring, but most were different kinds of puzzles. There were word jumbles, simple crossword puzzles, words hidden up, down or diagonally in a mass of letters, and things hidden in a larger picture. But my favorite was Connect-the-Dots. I would look at the page, and squint my eyes trying to see the shape described by mentally connecting the collection of dots, even tilting the page for a better angle. Sometimes I could guess what the completed figure would be, but more often, I would have no clue until just before I was done.
There was something fascinating about the page hiding a picture among the numbered dots and the few odd shapes and random lines scattered about. Putting my pencil down on #1, I would carefully connect the dots until the picture emerged, with the apparently odd shapes and random lines becoming important parts of an airplane or elephant or truck. Connecting the dots is Hoffman’s metaphor for ‘spiritual discourse.’
Life is very much like that activity page, as we connect the disparate dots of daily events. Some of the dots are major, significant moments in our lives, but so many more are the unplanned dots that appear on our day-to-day path of life. Some dots we look forward to and are prepared for, some are special, important celebrations. Some are unexpected and occasionally upsetting. But most are ordinary dots that just happen. Throughout our lives we connect the dots, looking for the picture that will be revealed, guessing what it might be, hoping what it might be.
Some religious traditions acknowledge the dots but deny any significance to them or the picture they form. Buddhism is one of those religions, and it’s why I’ve never been seriously attracted to Buddhist philosophy. Buddhism declares that life-experiences are significant, but only in the moment and for the moment. We may learn something from them, but we soon leave them behind to arrive at the next experience, disconnected and disassociated from the last. The Buddhist denies the apparent pattern of those disparate dots and looks for larger meaning beyond and unconnected to one’s personal experience. Buddhism points to a transcendent and infinite pattern that incorporates a universal “we.”
Judaism is different. The dots of our daily existence are indeed connected components of reality. Each dot does mean something, and connecting the dots reveals a pattern, and the patterns form an image of who we are. Different from Buddhism, Judaism affords ordinary events an absolute and immediate importance. We learn from them, they become part of the fabric of our lives. “Spiritual discourse” begins with taking very seriously the dots that we daily connect.
Judaism affirms that the dots are important, and that connecting them reveals something significant. But sometimes modern Western thought takes this notion too far when we’re told that the pattern of our lives requires further analysis to discover the psychological, sociological, and familial forces that unconsciously direct our behavior. Modern Western thought sometimes wants to explain and analyze what’s behind our behavior in both the conscious and unconscious pattern of the dots, finding reasons for why we do what we do, reasons that go beyond one’s own personal choices.
And then there are those folks who believe that the pattern of connected dots is directed by fate or the hand of God. Every experiential dot, they say, points to a predictably and pre-determined coherent pattern that defines and encompasses past, present and future. So for them, for instance, opening to a random page in the Bible reveals a personal message from God, or the number on the license plate of the car ahead becomes the number played in the daily lottery, or the memory triggered by a song on the radio becomes a sign that a certain someone wants to talk to you, or the dream last night came as a warning, or the spilled juice in the morning is a harbinger of bad things to come.
Jewish theology, at least my Jewish theology, declares that our experiences are no more, and no less, than what they seem. The moments we experience are indeed the real stuff of life (unlike the East), and do not point to directing and controlling forces outside our lives (unlike some psychiatrists and most mystics), and are not directed messages from beyond (unlike horoscope readers and Bible-thumpers). Living our lives, connecting those dots, and recognizing that their revealed pattern is a picture of who we are, and what we have chosen to be, is what my Judaism teaches—nothing more, nothing less.
And we spend, I think, too much time, effort and energy examining those larger important dots of our lives, only to look for the next large dot to which they ought to be connected. The truth is that who we are is really described by connecting the more numerous mundane, ordinary dots of human existence. The shape and direction of our lives is determined more by what I did yesterday and am doing today. And when we learn to pay closer attention to those connected, daily dots of existence and experience, the real patterned picture of our lives appears on the page. And it’s those dots which are both positive and negative experiences, appearing expectantly and unexpectedly, that tell us who we are, and do predict who we will become.
I’m reminded of the success of the Jerry Seinfeld series, which proclaimed itself a TV show about nothing, but appealed to us because we saw how those nothing-dots connected themselves into a whole “something”. Life is what we get when we string those ordinary moments together, connecting the dots of our lives to reveal an honest picture of who we are. But Rabbi Hoffman also wrote of the difficulty of discerning that pattern.
[Our] most important challenge is to find shape in our lives. We are indeed relegated to playing the child’s game of connect-the-dots, except the real-life game is much harder to complete because our dots are endless and they come unnumbered. There is no ready-made shape to the page of life. We have to make it up as we go along. We never know for sure that the shape we have in our head will continue to work. [But] we pick up our pencils each day and continue [connecting].
The challenge and the struggle to find patterns and meaning and value is one’s lifework.
Spiritual discourse is the give-and-take of my conscious interaction with the moments of my life. It is to be fully aware of the dots, to look for meaning in the way I connect one to the other, and satisfied if not excited about the picture that then emerges. In Gates of Prayer, my old Reform Shabbat siddur, is this meditation:
And artist in the course of painting will pause, lay aside the brush, step back from the canvas and consider what needs to be done, what direction is to be taken… As I hope to make my life a work of art, so I turn back to the canvas of life to paint the portrait of my highest self.
To be human is to make meaningful the pattern of my life’s dots. To be Jewish is to look for ways to merge my pattern into the larger, even universal, picture that is a broader canvas of dots—one that includes me in a picture of the Jewish community, one that enfolds us in God’s ultimate inclusive pattern.
On Needing Our Enemies Yom Kippur 2025
Earlier in our service this morning we read “You are slow to anger, ready to forgive. It is not the death of sinners that You seek, but that they should turn from their ways and live. Until the last day You wait for them, welcoming them as soon as they turn to You”.
It reminds me a little of that often spoken phrase “Hate the sin but love the sinner”. It has become something of a catch phrase among Christian (and now Jewish) fundamentalists referencing their LGBTQ folks. Though the quote is never found (for Christians) in the New Testament, or our Hebrew Scriptures, it does seem to be the basis for this Yom Kippur confident expectation of a compassionate God.
We’re all familiar with the verse from Leviticus (19:18) “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But interestingly, what immediately precedes it is God’s command to “not hate your kinsman in your heart.” It’s as if Leviticus wants us to realize that before we can learn to love our neighbors, we first have to struggle with rooting out hatred at home. But what is not found in these verses is if it is still okay to hate our enemies, of which we lately seem to have so many! Christianity apparently says ‘no, it’s not okay’. Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus saying “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44)”. Is ‘loving your enemy’ also a Jewish thing?
Nowhere in Hebrew Scriptures do we find “love your neighbor and also your enemy”. But Torah does teach “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or ass wandering, you must take it back to him. When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden and would refrain from raising it, you must, nevertheless, raise it with him” (Exodus 23:4–5). But if I have to help my enemy when he needs it, can I nevertheless still hate him?!
This past summer I read an article that highlighted the teaching of the 16th C mystic Rabbi Yehudah Loew known as the Maharal of Prague. He is best known from the folktale in which Rabbi Loew creates the golem, the clay figure that comes to life and wreaks havoc in the Prague ghetto. But in real life he is best known for his expansive commentary on the book of Exodus. In it he asks: “If Egypt was such an evil, wretched nation, how could it have been the very place where Israel, the holiest of nations, was formed?” He answers: “For one thing is activated by its opposite, for a thing cannot be activated by itself.” So Israel, he wrote, needed Egypt if they were to understand and appreciate the evil of slavery and oppression. The true nature of a thing is only fully known in relation to its opposite. He wrote: “When a good thing is known from its opposite, that is true knowledge.”
This notion that opposites inform one another, that we learn the true nature of things by contrasting them, goes all the way back to Aristotle and is reaffirmed by both Jewish and Muslim medieval scholars, including Maimonides. Applied here, the principle is that our enemies can serve as a reflection by which we may better understand ourselves. Rabbi Loew, however, wrote that while the two opposite forces may antagonize one another, they in fact, act on, “activate” each other to create a complete whole. Thus they are necessarily connected.
It means that not only may my enemy help me understand who I am, but more than that, my enemy holds some part of a greater truth that I do not. Thus my position represents only part of the total reality, which is a unified, harmonization of opposites. Rabbi Loew concludes by saying that evil too, is an important part of our existence. Why is there evil in this world? Because without it we would not, could not, fully understand or appreciate what it means to do the “good”.
From this it follows that we should, in some way, value our enemies. They exist as our other halves, our unexpected partners in this world. It does not, however, mean that we should love them, but neither will it serve us to dismiss them as worthless, or to waste energy hating them. Rabbi Loew challenges us with the proposition that we need our enemies, for they hold some part of the larger truth that we are missing. And if we could learn to identify and integrate that truth, it would enable us to come closer to repairing our world—which is our God-given responsibility.
I try, I really try to apply that concept to what is happening in Israel. But how does the horrendous and appalling reality of the death and destruction of so many, in any way help me to see how a just and moral outcome might be achieved? And it’s all bad there: Hamas terrorists, the West Bank extremist settlers, the nationalist Israeli political and religious right-wing, and the self-serving Netanyahu government.
I’m still enraged by the October 7 attack two years ago. Innocent Israelis slaughtered, butchered, and kidnapped; held captive, brutalized, raped and executed. And to what extent was and is Hamas wholly supported and cheered on by the general Palestinian public? But then, shouldn’t we also be appalled by the condition of the displaced Palestinian families, now two years later living what can only be a frightful, horrific existence?
And then I’m equally enraged at the Netanyahu government, which has for years turned a blind eye to Hamas activity in Gaza, allowing Hamas to flourish as opposition to Abbas and his West Bank Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu wants a weakened, powerless Palestinian Authority that would never be able to secure support for a Two-State Solution because Netanyahu and his radical rightwing are opposed to the possibility (much less the creation!) of an independent Palestinian state. The Netanyahu government has its own version of “From the river to the sea”, which explains the government allowing Settler attacks on Palestinian villages, its proposed occupation of Gaza, and the expected annexation of the West Bank..
Rabbi Yehudah Loew, in 16th C Prague would tell us we can’t hate the enemy because what they do and who they are is ying to our yang. Until and unless we know, understand and can appreciate the human capacity for cruel, brutal and vicious behavior, we can never fully know, understand or sincerely appreciate the ultimate importance of justice, righteousness, kindness and humility.
And because I am Zionist, a supporter of Israel and her absolute right to a safe and secure existence, I agree with Walt Kelly’s Pogo who I quoted on Rosh Hashanah evening: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Netanyahu and his government have unknowingly spotlighted for us not only the importance of the original ideals with which Israel was founded, but the ease with which they can so quickly be dismissed.
The issues in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are clearly seen in their stark reality: the wanton cruelty of Hamas, the anguish and misery of the Palestinians, the desperate pleas from the hostage families, the destructive intentions of Netanyahu and his government, and the malicious raids by the West Bank Settlers. In so many ways ‘they are us’. And Rabbi Loew would tell us that they “activate” our morality, that recognizing their reality, we know and understand what we must do in response. The question for us of course is what can we do here, on the other side of the world, when action has to be, must be, decisively taken over there?!
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I said that we must stand up, up front, “loud and proud” in the face of America’s growing antipathy and hostility to Jews and Jewish institutions. To our neighbors we must clearly present ourselves as Americans who belong here, different from them in some ways but equal in all ways. And so when questioned about “Israel”, we must be equally clear that we hate the sin but love the sinner.
We may not be directly able to change the attitudes of many of our neighbors, but we can stand tall and be firm in who we are, as Jews and as Americans. And we may not be directly able to bring sanity and morality to the Middle East, but we can be clear in declaring what we know is right and what is wrong.
Our Jewish Tradition declares “do justice, righteousness and lovingkindness”, and the other side of that coin sharpens the focus, and the clarity, and the immediacy of that demand. On Erev Rosh Hashanah I concluded with Hillel’s words of almost 2000 years ago:
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
Yizkor/Memorial Message Yom Kippur 2025
Gertrude Housman, an American 20th C poet wrote:
I came into the world without being asked
and when the time for dying comes
I shall not be consulted;
but between the boundaries of birth and death
lies the dominion of choice:
to be a doer or a dreamer,
to be a lifter or a leaner,
to speak out or remain silent,
to extend a hand in friendship
or to look the other way;
to feel the sufferings of others
or to be callous and insensitive.
these are the choices;
It is in the choosing
that my measure as a person
Is determined.
On Yom Kippur we are urged to be totally honest with ourselves. We’re told that our focus these last 10 days is to be inward, private, self-reflective. But on this one, single, moment during these “Days of Awe”, our thoughts turn outward, remembering, honoring the memories of our friends and family members who have died. And in remembering them, in all the ways their lives touched ours, the choices they made have made all the difference in how we see them, hear them, and remember them now.
Today, to remember, lizkor in Hebrew, should also mean “to learn”. Let these names and the lives of these remembered family and friends, teach us the singularly important lesson that our choices, day-in and day-out, choices routine and remarkable, determine not only who we are, but how we will be remembered.
Zichronam livracha, may their memories be a blessing, and may we leave memories that will be a blessing to those we leave behind.
Last June I celebrated the 50th year of my rabbinic ordination.
There was no Office Party, I was not presented with a gold watch for my years of service. I supposed I could have called fellow ordainees from the Class of ’75, we could have met for round of beers—except there’s no one in the area for me to call, and most of those still alive I haven’t spoken to in some time.
What I’m saying is that there was not much fanfare—actually there was no fanfare. Barb congratulated the both of us for successfully navigating the years unscathed, intact and still happily together. Our kids called, amazed that it’s really been all of 50 years. And I did get a call from the temple secretary of my first congregation in Indiana, still there after all this time, telling me that I was always her favorite. June came and went, and in this 51st year I’m doing pretty much the same rabbi-things even after retiring from full-time in the congregation, but I’m doing a whole lot less of them. As June came and went, I found myself thinking about what I’ve learned in all these years.
After ordination our first congregation was in St. Louis. I was the third rabbi of over 1500 families. And since most folks there didn’t care so much about what the third rabbi said or did, I quietly went about my business and watched and listened and learned. And three years later, we moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, a city of about 70,000 and a congregation of 120 families who cared very much what their rabbi said and did. And because we were the only Jewish presence within three counties-- I was probably the only rabbi, maybe the only Jew, most in Terre Haute would meet during my 16 years there.
Because it never occurred to me to blend quietly and discreetly into the background of the community, I sought out the local clergy group and announced my presence. Not surprisingly some were not too pleased with the prospect of a Jew joining them. But I was not going away, and after a few friendly, but challenging discussions over the apparent messianic predictions in the “Old Testament”, those few that I seem to have offended chose to leave, and the rest of us went on our merry way becoming the very best of friends. I learned then that standing up for oneself, for one’s tradition and heritage, though never at the expense or degradation of others is what others most respect, and which make for honest and open and long-lasting relationships.
In Terre Haute, folks generally knew that Jews were there and were happy that we were there. There were a few Jewish physicians, attorneys, and assorted white collar workers-- but for the most part, folks knew Jews from downtown main street which was populated by small and large Jewish businesses, from mom-and-pops to the one large department store.
Though my rabbinic priority was seeing to the needs of my congregation, as the only professional and public Jew it was also my responsibility to protect my community by maintaining and strengthening our presence within the dominant Christian culture. My acceptance, involvement and public presence with local clergy colleagues afforded me opportunities to become known in the community. I was asked to join the hospital’s Ethics Committee. I was invited to the board and later elected President of the regional Planned Parenthood agency. I taught at both Indiana State University and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. And our synagogue became known as an interesting, stimulating and worthwhile place to bring school and church groups. And in addressing our visitors’ obvious and expected religious questions it only helped that I was well-informed and conversant in the New Testament and Early Christian history.
And in all those 16 years we never once had an anti-Semitic call or threat or protest or spray paint incident. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that in a small-town you don’t pick on or go after an acknowledged and recognized community group. We may have been in the background of an otherwise thoroughly Christian culture, but we were legitimately part of the community, commercially certainly, but religiously as well, and as one of my members was told: “Your rabbi stands toe-to-toe, and side-by-side with our Protestant and Catholic clergy.”
And yes, the times were very different then. It was a small town, and there was no Muslim or pro-Palestinian presence. Israel was still David fighting Arab Goliaths, the Six Days War was still in recent memory. “Back home in Indiana. . . on the banks of the Wabash” they apparently had not heard of or had disremembered Henry Ford’s notorious Dearborn Independent which warned that Jewish communists, who were also capitalists, were a threat to Western Civilization. And there were no national leaders or television personalities or podcasts hell bent on fracturing our country into those who are real Americans and those who are enemies of the state and a menace to our very existence.
But now, years later, the Jewish community is in a very different social, cultural and political environment.
- And because we are not living in small-town, sheltered communities where folks tend, more often than not, to look out for each other;
- and because today “the Jews” are no longer just our neighbors but have become colonialists of international apartheid;
- and because today there is no such thing as “the” news, but there’s “my news”, and “your news” and “fake news”;
- and mostly because today our airways proliferate with fear-mongering pundits who cry out “the end is near” and only the right kind of leader or the right kind of party can save us from the treachery of the “other”;
- and because today this chaotic tumult that is our social, cultural reality needs a boogey man to take the blame!—They point to the Jews!
It was not so long ago that the conservative right and the liberal left praised the Zionist enterprise in Israel as a bulwark against Muslim terrorism. Israel was our great ally in the war against jihad, the only real democracy in the Middle East. When in November 1975 the United Nations General Assembly declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” America (for the most part) was united in her support of Israel, not only in Washington and on Wall Street, but on Main Street and campus quads and in university classrooms. These days, not so much.
Now I am no fan of the current Israeli government, as I assume most of you know. I have only disdain for the way Israeli Arabs and Reform and Conservative Jews are deprived of their social, civil and for us, religious rights. And I seethe in anger at the behavior of the West Bank Settlement community. But to decry the immoral actions of the Israeli government in Gaza as evidence, as proof, of the malice and malevolence of Zionism, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Zionism is bigger than the appalling behavior of the Israeli government, it is an idea, a moral imperative, and a national right.
And what we see today in the streets, on campuses, in spray-painted graffiti, in so many attacks on Jews and synagogues-- is anti-Semitism plain and simple. It is a kind of Jew-hate that seemed to have disappeared a a generation ago but apparently was festering underground, an infection just beneath the surface, just waiting, like the troll beneath the bridge, to jump out and swallow us up. And most appalling, at least to me in ways so personally hurtful, are so many national Protestant assemblies who denounce Israel and its apartheid colonialist imperial Zionist agenda. Where are those who once were our friends?
Those on the political and religious far right were never on our side: the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and radical nationalist hate groups. They’ve raised their ugly heads most recently immediately after the shooting of Charlie Kirk--
- On Instagram, The Greatest Noticer, a neo-Nazi post, declared: “Charlie Kirk was assassinated by jews,”
- Ryan Matta, a podcast host with more than 200,000 followers, declared: “At this point does anyone not thi[nk] Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Mossad?”
- The far-right conspiracy podcast Infowars, declared back on August 13: “I’m not gonna name names, but I was told by someone close to Charlie Kirk that Charlie thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against them.”
- And just yesterday at Charlie Kirk’s Memorial, Tucker Carlson recounted the plot to kill Jesus saying “The Savior was betrayed by those hummas-eaters in Jerusalem who were terrified by his truth-telling.” As if to say: They did it then, they’ve done it again!
As I said before, even many of our friends in the moderate center and liberal left, who were always with us—no longer are. Collectively we were “Catholic, Protestant, Jew”, melted in the American pot, the epitome of America’s successful democratic demonstration of “freedom of faith”. But at the most recent biennial of the Presbyterian Church USA the delegates reaffirmed their position singling out Israel for “animus, fixation, double standards and demonization.” One of their biennial leaders declared “Israel is an apartheid state. There is a growing consensus in the church that we shouldn’t be profiting from Israel’s human rights abuses and, frankly, genocide against Palestinians.” Apparently, Zionism still equals racism, which is still Jew-hate.
On college campuses not so long ago we thrived. The “Jewish presence” was praised and promoted in their marketing materials. Now Jewish university presidents have been removed from office because they’ve not “sufficiently suppressed anti-Semitism”. Jewish students are reportedly withdrawing from their universities for schools which offer them protection. And anti-Semitism itself has disgracefully become weaponized by this government with the one singular purpose of attacking liberal educational institutions. I ask: “Sir, have you no shame?”
Just this summer another traditional Jewish ally turned against us. In July, the National Education Association used its annual conference to adopt a measure that effectively would prevent the union’s teachers from “using, endorsing or publicizing” any educational materials created by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL’s peer-reviewed programs have for many years helped educators teach students the dangers of bias and prejudice. The ADL developed and distributes “Echoes and Reflections,” a well-known, highly-praised program that includes lessons on the Holocaust. And the ADL’s “No Place for Hate,” is a student-led program used in more than 2,000 schools every year. Its classroom content and extracurricular activities offer a message of inclusion that is entirely apolitical. It’s designed solely to bring students together to better understand the differences that too often divide us.
The NEA’s move to eliminate these programs was not really about the ADL. It was a clear and unambiguous statement to Jewish educators, Jewish parents and children that they can be replaced. The NEA activists that pushed the resolution at the convention did not identify any single or specific problem with the ADL curricula. They did not question the pedagogic approach. They did not gather data from the thousands of schools using the ADL programs. They did, however, have an issue with ADL’s outspoken condemnation of today’s anti-Semitism. They did however have an issue with the ADL’s continuing commitment to Zionism, and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
Now I’m not always a fan of the ADL. They are occasionally, in my opinion, excessively over-the-top in their public protestations. But I am certainly supportive of their programs, and especially the K-12 curricula they offer to our public and private schools. This is only another example of our former friends on the center and left echoing this increasing and pervasive anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist rhetoric. Said one NEA delegate to that conference: “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil-fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change”. Think for a moment on how incredibly perverse that statement is: “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil-fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change”.
However, the action of the NEA activists was rejected and reversed weeks later when the leadership of the NEA voted to overrule the conference resolution, no doubt in response to hundreds of protests from schools, educators and national Jewish organizations. In doing so, the NEA leadership belatedly recognized “a growing level of antisemitic activity [among its members] to marginalize mainstream Jewish voices within the nation’s public school system.”
When I became a professional Jew fifty years ago, and set up shop in a small Indiana city, I knew that my primary responsibility was to serve the religious and educational and pastoral needs of my congregation. But it would also be my responsibility to represent them out in the community as a legitimate and authentic member of the local clergy, and the congregation’s honest, truthful and responsive rabbi. The only way it felt right for me was to stand up “loud and proud” with my families, and to the community-at-large.
After fifty years, after so much has changed, after we are no longer “Catholic, Protestant Jew”, equal among equals, allied with the left in fighting the radical right. This I know: our community and each of us personally, must often and openly, dramatically stand up loud and proud declaring we are here and we belong here. We must loudly and proudly refuse to let others define us as “other”, we must call out former friends who have been brainwashed by those who have for their own profit and benefit declared us to be racists.
Fifty years seems like forever ago—but 2000 years ago Hillel said
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
As American Jews we have with good cause become anxious and ill-at-ease, even fearful because we are ‘Jewish’ Americans! But we cannot allow ourselves to become the boogeyman that others would have us be and need us to be.
Anti-Semitism, whether disguised as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist or anti-war or pro-Palestinian has become a nationalized weaponized cudgel to beat down free-speech, liberal values, diversity, equality and inclusion. It is Jew-hate however it is disguised. I have never, in my 50 years as a rabbi looked over my American shoulder fearful of what might come next; I have never thought of myself, by nature or persuasion, as particularly paranoid. On the other hand, I’ve never said “It can’t happen here”, though I have always thought America was different.
In the 1950’s, Walt Kelly’s Pogo said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”. Indeed “the enemy is us” because we have put those in power who do and will use anti-Semitism to further their own ends. We were told, we were warned that this kind of chaos would result, and we did it anyway.
Our friends are few and far between, and we will need them if we are to de-weaponize the cudgel of anti-Semitism. I believe we still have friends out there, and that we will find them if you and I stand loud and proud, and if together, we all stand up for the soul of America.
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
We can only hope for a shana tova.
After Fifty Years—On Being Remembered Rosh Hashana 5786/2025
This past June 6 marked the 50th anniversary of my ordination from Hebrew Union College.
Two years earlier, in the summer of 1973, Barb and I were in the heart of Mississippi, working at the Reform Movement’s Regional summer camp. A rabbinic student then, I was the camp’s program director and Barb ran the office. I remember vividly the opening day of the first session: cars would drive in through the gates, the backseat doors would burst open with eager and excited campers—some anxiously looking for old friends, others a bit overwhelmed by so much activity. My job that day was to welcome each car, introduce myself, answer any questions and direct them to parking and registration.
As I finished instructing one parent, their little boy, probably eight or nine years old, slipped out of the car and walked up to me saying, with a thick southern drawl “Excuse me sir—are all of these folks Jews?” I told him yes. “All o’them?” he asked, pointing to a hundred or so milling parents and campers and counselors. “All of them” I told him. “I can’t believe it” he said softly, “I’ve never seen so many Jews, all in one place.”
A few weeks into camp one of our counselors came to me with a request. In her cabin of 14-year-olds, a girl from a small town in Tennessee has expressed her regret at not celebrating her Bat Mitzvah. There was no synagogue in her town, the nearest was Knoxville a couple hours away and her family only went there for the High Holidays. She had heard this summer about her campmates’ Bat Mitzvah experiences. The counselor wanted to know if we could “do her Bat Mitzvah” here at camp, and since she’d be staying through the second session, we had six weeks to prepare.
I met with her every day after lunch during rest hour. We started with the Aleph-Bet, added some grammar and translation, and then worked directly on the Hebrew of the portion that would be read on the camp’s last Shabbat. And on that morning, she did beautifully. All of us were very proud of her. It was a wonderful way for the camping summer to end.
Twenty-two years later, in November of 1995, I was attending the National Biennial of the UAHC (now the URJ-- Union of Reform Judaism) which was meeting in Atlanta. I have always been impressed by the national biennials that bring thousands of Reform Jews together for a long weekend of speakers, classes and congregational discussions. At that Atlanta Convention, with well over 3000 participants and at every biennial, I thought how amazing it was that there were so many Reform Jews in one place, each time recalling the wonder and wide eyes of that camper arriving at our Mississippi camp.
And on the last day of the convention, a woman came up to me and introduced herself. She was my 14-year-old camp Bat Mitzvah student, now 22 years older. Grown, married with children, elected to the board of her Atlanta congregation, she was a delegate to the Biennial. She had been looking for me, hoping that I would be attending. She told me that the summer of her Bat Mitzvah had changed her Jewish life. From a marginally and quietly Jewish, little girl in Bristol Tennessee—here she was, a representative of her congregation at the national convention of the Reform Movement. She said that she’d been waiting a long time to thank me for changing her Jewish life. Excited, she wanted her husband and kids to meet me and was hoping that we could get together that day, the Sunday that the biennial ended. We never did meet up and we’ve not spoken since. One never knows what little thing, what small gift of time or effort, will change a life. And had she not found me in Atlanta, I would not have known what I had given her.
Fifteen years ago a married couple came to Temple Emanu-El for Friday services but didn’t enter the building. Neither one was Jewish, but they thought that maybe Judaism would be what they wanted for themselves. Not knowing, and somewhat fearful of what these Jews would say to strangers, they sat in their car, debated whether to go in, and eventually drove off. They were back the next Friday night, and again sat in their car watching folks go into the building, and compounded their distress as they went back and forth: ‘what if we do something wrong?’, but ‘what have we got to lose?’, but ‘what if we embarrass ourselves?’, and ‘what if they don’t want us?’ And again they drove away. The third week, they told themselves that this was silly. What could the Jews inside, do or say that was worse than what they were doing to themselves? So they entered the building and walked into the sanctuary.
Telling me their story a week later sitting in my office, they said that in an instant, their fears vanished when they were met by two ushers in the sanctuary. With smiles they were welcomed and given a service bulletin. They told the ushers “this is our first time.” “Then we’re especially happy to have you with us”, the usher said, and added “if we can help with questions or anything else, we’ll be right here.”
A year later the couple joined Temple Emanu-El on the day of their conversions and immediately volunteered to serve as ushers so that they might personally welcome and make comfortable anyone coming into “their congregation”. The ushers on that one Friday night will never know the magnitude of the impact they had on that couple, or the generational consequences of their warm welcome.
On Yom Kippur specifically but throughout these ten days, our tradition and our prayerbook call for us to reflect and consider our actions of the year just past. I would put a different challenge to you this morning. Instead of looking back, regretting what you did or didn’t do— look ahead and ask yourself ‘what will be my Jewish legacy? For what will I be remembered in my Jewish community, or by the way, out there as a Jew in the community-at-large?’ Last night I spoke about “living Jewish—loud and proud.” We do not know, and we cannot know, the small but meaningful ways we impact others.
On Yom Kippur afternoon our Yizkor names will be read. Hearing them will prompt memories of special people, remembering how each touched our lives. For me, and I assume for you as well, Yizkor is something of a transcendent experience as particular names momentarily lift us beyond the immediacy of the afternoon service. And perhaps, unconsciously, we hope that we will, one day, also be remembered well.
Some of us are fortunate to be in a position to make a difference in the Jewish lives of our GPJC families. But each of us and all of us can have an effect on the future of our community whose intimate nature means that everyone is special and important. Unlike the organizational operations of all those synagogues to our west, everyone here could have a hand in the present well-being and the future of our Council. We are in this together, and what we have is worth leaving a legacy.
But more significant is the personal legacy that is ours to leave as we’re remembered by our family and friends. What will our names engender when read for Yizkor? Rabbinic tradition has it that every person has three names: the names our parents gave us; the names by which we’re known in the community; and most importantly, the name which our own deeds procure for us. (Midrash Tanchuma, Vayakhal 1) And that third name is based not on what other people call us, not by our job titles, but by the kind of person we became.
We want to be remembered, we want to leave something behind, a reminder that indeed we ‘passed this way’. Many think of their children as their tangible, living and breathing, memorials. Some find comfort that their names are engraved on plaques and dedications. But to be “remembered for a blessing”, to be remembered for how we lived and how we touched other lives is most important of all, and is indeed the message of the Yom Kippur Yizkor Memorial.
Many of those names will be remembered for tangible and touchable moments of personal contact, experiences shared, lessons learned. But with others, it’s not what they particularly or explicitly said or did, but rather it’s a lasting memory of how they made us feel. I think of those as emotive memories, which of course could either be warm and comforting, or cold and bitter. And it’s those emotive memories, good or bad, which impact us the most and last the longest. They often come upon us unexpected, they stop us in the present, momentarily lose us in a remembered past as we sense again how they made us feel. When I hear familiar names on the Yizkor and Kaddish lists, and of course family names, time stops for a moment, and I remember.
It’s ironic I think, that more often than not, it’s the memorial list that reminds us of their impact on us, when we suddenly, momentarily are aware of the impression they made. Ironic that, more often than not, it’s after they’ve gone that we most appreciate what they meant to us.
As a youngster going with my parents to Temple on Friday nights, I would eagerly anticipate the moment when, after reading the Kaddish names, the rabbi would always conclude: “Our loved ones live on in the acts of goodness they performed and in the hearts of those they cherished”. I awaited those words because it meant that we would soon go home. For me then, it was just the anticipated catchphrase that signaled the end of the service. But it is, of course, as I came to learn, the very essence of the legacy we hope to leave.
Though we can, for the most part, know how we will be remembered and for what, we can never know the extent to which our passing lives unknowingly impact others. We go about our daily progress through the years unaware of how our simple gestures might make a difference in someone’s day, or mood, or life; or when a friendship means far more to the other person than you had thought; or when just doing one’s job well changes everything for those around you.
We want to be remembered well, and only we can make that happen. My wish this morning is that when that time comes for all of us, may we live on in the acts of goodness we performed and in the hearts of those we cherish.
Connecting the Dots Erev Yom Kippur 2025
This past August the CCAR, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, my Reform rabbinic organization, offered a series of webinars to “help prepare us for the Holidays”. I noted particularly a webcast entitled “Infusing High Holy Day Worship with Creativity.”
Apparently some of my colleagues, or their congregations, believe that their worship services need some “creative infusing”, that they are apparently not satisfying, not fulfilling, the needs of their members. This dissatisfaction is most often expressed as “not spiritually uplifting”. I suppose that had I joined the webcast, I would now know what needs to be “infused”. I have however, always believed that folks come to these Holiday services expecting and wanting a “comfort-experience”-- a reminder and a renewal of what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have always meant to them, that ‘things should be the way things should be!’ And even though I have serious problems with the liturgy of our prayerbook which proclaims an intellectually flawed theology (something I speak on almost every year), the familiarity of the service with its readings, prayers, and music transcend the reality of a theology that doesn’t work for me. (If you want, we can talk more about that tomorrow after the morning service.)
But I do understand and can appreciate the congregational reality that folks seem less and less interested in synagogue worship. And the numbers bear that out. Synagogues struggle to maintain membership. Sanctuaries on Friday evening and Saturday morning seat fewer and fewer Jews. “Unaffiliated” has joined Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Orthodox as a recognized Jewish identification.
That CCAR webcast announcement reminded me of something in my files. It was given to me almost 25 years ago by a Christian colleague, an article from his national organization.
[C]hurch leaders theorize that people [are] leaving churches not because they [are] tired of spirituality, but because they [are] tired of the typical churchy kind of spirituality, tired of the boring, remote, and highly institutionalized forms in which the established churches always [seem] to package the search for God. These people are termed “seekers”: religious free agents, people untethered from conventional church loyalties, human beings hungrily searching in their own ways for a spiritual experience in very personal, immediate, often unconventional…ways. [Congregations Jul/Aug 2001]
This group of “seekers” has become a acknowledged sociological group called SBNR, “Spiritual but not religious”. They have them and we have them, and we’ve been aware of them since the ‘90’s when American Judaism, and Reform in particular, pushed itself along a path of “spiritual renewal”. I watched synagogues innovate their worship with drums and tambourines and dancing in the aisles to an extended Mi Chamocha. Some synagogues thought that making worship more informal, more casual would attract a younger group. And some thought that more upbeat, inventive and modern music should carry the worship and attract these “seekers”.
The search for spirituality seems to have become an annual Jewish pastime in our congregations. And the search has attracted both the most knowledgeable and least knowledgeable of Jews, all of whom have opinions on what does and does not “move them.” Some want worship to primarily touch the senses and some want to engage their rational intellect. Some argue that more “traditional” worship is needed and some want more modernity injected into the service; and some only want the worship that they remember as a child growing up. And each solution declares that it is an “authentic” path to meaningful spiritual uplift.
I remember speaking with a Jewish college student a few years back who had trouble accepting “organized religion”. His Jewish experience in the synagogue left him unsatisfied, and he questioned the necessity of joining a congregation. Synagogue, he said, meant “rules and rituals” which were dull and uninteresting rather than uplifting and inspiring. He didn’t want “religion”, he wanted “spirituality.” He wanted to return to and recapture the fulfilling and enthusiastic Jewish spirit he’d last felt when he was 6 years old, standing in front of the Ark, at his Consecration, clutching his miniature Torah Scroll. With Judaism now uninteresting, he had broadened his search in college to include other faiths, and in Buddhist philosophy he had found, he said “the path of wisdom and unification which brings everything together.” Buddhism he told me did not “postulate a God”, but affirmed a “living force” that united plants, animals and human beings.
This college student was not then, and is not today, alone in both his effort to seek a spiritual path to truth and meaning, and in his discovery of Buddhism. A lot of Jews, it seems, are attracted to Buddhism, particularly Israelis who are turned off by the only organized religion they know— state-sponsored Orthodoxy. They, and some American Jews identify as “Jew-Bu’s”. They’ve rejected Orthodox Judaism and its dry, dictatorial and overbearing demands of ritual and rabbinic law. And they feel abandoned by the uninspired secularism of modern liberal Judaism—thus they are disenchanted by both the traditional right and the liberal left.
I can appreciate the disenchantment, but I don’t know how a congregation might “infuse spirituality” into its worship. And I’m the wrong person to ask! For 50 years, my responsibility in leading worship was to fundamentally focus was on which page we were on, and which reading came next, and if I was ready with the tune for next prayer, or hoping that the cantor knew the next cue. Personal spiritual moments for me, few and far between, were when everyone, together, sang the liturgy, especially the Sh’ma and Mi Chamocha and often the closing song. It was in those moments that I was able to lift my attention from the page, that I felt “lifted” beyond the the immediacy of the moment.
And when I would ask my folks “What’s missing in what we do?” I never got a clear or useable answer. But I did find meaningful a long article by Rabbi Larry Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College, an article that I had paperclipped to the Christian magazine article I already cited. Rabbi Hoffman wrote:
Religions are ways of conceptualizing the entire universe of existence. Spiritual discourse is thus a particular way to live in the world—one that leads us to appreciate things that we would not be conscious of were we to limit ourselves to the way our secular culture describes reality. What makes religions unique is the way they order the world. There are Jewish ways of doing this, as there are Christian and Muslim and Buddhist ways.
Noting Hoffman’s words: “Religion leads us to appreciate things that we would not otherwise be conscious of,” religions then prompt us to refocus on what is really important in our lives. With “spiritual discourse”, he wrote, we might find order, meaning, satisfying fulfillment in one’s human experience.
For those attracted to the mysticism of Kabbalah that “discourse” is learning the secret powers of the universe, to be in touch with the unseen forces that control the realm of destiny and reality, and is primarily an intellectual, textual pursuit. Opposite that is a personal, emotionally moving and sensual “feeling”, loke that which comes when we are touched by music or poetry or art or architecture or nature.
For me however, “spirituality” is a continuing and confirming awareness of a sense above the ordinary and mundane, an awareness that my life not only has order in-and-of-itself but also is in harmony with the greater order of the universe. Rabbi Hoffman suggested that we should think about the process of “spiritual discourse” as a metaphor. And he offers one that works well for me and provides (finally) the focus of this evening’s message.
As a child, I would often occupy myself with activity books. Some of the pages were for coloring, but most were different kinds of puzzles. There were word jumbles, simple crossword puzzles, words hidden up, down or diagonally in a mass of letters, and things hidden in a larger picture. But my favorite was Connect-the-Dots. I would look at the page, and squint my eyes trying to see the shape described by mentally connecting the collection of dots, even tilting the page for a better angle. Sometimes I could guess what the completed figure would be, but more often, I would have no clue until just before I was done.
There was something fascinating about the page hiding a picture among the numbered dots and the few odd shapes and random lines scattered about. Putting my pencil down on #1, I would carefully connect the dots until the picture emerged, with the apparently odd shapes and random lines becoming important parts of an airplane or elephant or truck. Connecting the dots is Hoffman’s metaphor for ‘spiritual discourse.’
Life is very much like that activity page, as we connect the disparate dots of daily events. Some of the dots are major, significant moments in our lives, but so many more are the unplanned dots that appear on our day-to-day path of life. Some dots we look forward to and are prepared for, some are special, important celebrations. Some are unexpected and occasionally upsetting. But most are ordinary dots that just happen. Throughout our lives we connect the dots, looking for the picture that will be revealed, guessing what it might be, hoping what it might be.
Some religious traditions acknowledge the dots but deny any significance to them or the picture they form. Buddhism is one of those religions, and it’s why I’ve never been seriously attracted to Buddhist philosophy. Buddhism declares that life-experiences are significant, but only in the moment and for the moment. We may learn something from them, but we soon leave them behind to arrive at the next experience, disconnected and disassociated from the last. The Buddhist denies the apparent pattern of those disparate dots and looks for larger meaning beyond and unconnected to one’s personal experience. Buddhism points to a transcendent and infinite pattern that incorporates a universal “we.”
Judaism is different. The dots of our daily existence are indeed connected components of reality. Each dot does mean something, and connecting the dots reveals a pattern, and the patterns form an image of who we are. Different from Buddhism, Judaism affords ordinary events an absolute and immediate importance. We learn from them, they become part of the fabric of our lives. “Spiritual discourse” begins with taking very seriously the dots that we daily connect.
Judaism affirms that the dots are important, and that connecting them reveals something significant. But sometimes modern Western thought takes this notion too far when we’re told that the pattern of our lives requires further analysis to discover the psychological, sociological, and familial forces that unconsciously direct our behavior. Modern Western thought sometimes wants to explain and analyze what’s behind our behavior in both the conscious and unconscious pattern of the dots, finding reasons for why we do what we do, reasons that go beyond one’s own personal choices.
And then there are those folks who believe that the pattern of connected dots is directed by fate or the hand of God. Every experiential dot, they say, points to a predictably and pre-determined coherent pattern that defines and encompasses past, present and future. So for them, for instance, opening to a random page in the Bible reveals a personal message from God, or the number on the license plate of the car ahead becomes the number played in the daily lottery, or the memory triggered by a song on the radio becomes a sign that a certain someone wants to talk to you, or the dream last night came as a warning, or the spilled juice in the morning is a harbinger of bad things to come.
Jewish theology, at least my Jewish theology, declares that our experiences are no more, and no less, than what they seem. The moments we experience are indeed the real stuff of life (unlike the East), and do not point to directing and controlling forces outside our lives (unlike some psychiatrists and most mystics), and are not directed messages from beyond (unlike horoscope readers and Bible-thumpers). Living our lives, connecting those dots, and recognizing that their revealed pattern is a picture of who we are, and what we have chosen to be, is what my Judaism teaches—nothing more, nothing less.
And we spend, I think, too much time, effort and energy examining those larger important dots of our lives, only to look for the next large dot to which they ought to be connected. The truth is that who we are is really described by connecting the more numerous mundane, ordinary dots of human existence. The shape and direction of our lives is determined more by what I did yesterday and am doing today. And when we learn to pay closer attention to those connected, daily dots of existence and experience, the real patterned picture of our lives appears on the page. And it’s those dots which are both positive and negative experiences, appearing expectantly and unexpectedly, that tell us who we are, and do predict who we will become.
I’m reminded of the success of the Jerry Seinfeld series, which proclaimed itself a TV show about nothing, but appealed to us because we saw how those nothing-dots connected themselves into a whole “something”. Life is what we get when we string those ordinary moments together, connecting the dots of our lives to reveal an honest picture of who we are. But Rabbi Hoffman also wrote of the difficulty of discerning that pattern.
[Our] most important challenge is to find shape in our lives. We are indeed relegated to playing the child’s game of connect-the-dots, except the real-life game is much harder to complete because our dots are endless and they come unnumbered. There is no ready-made shape to the page of life. We have to make it up as we go along. We never know for sure that the shape we have in our head will continue to work. [But] we pick up our pencils each day and continue [connecting].
The challenge and the struggle to find patterns and meaning and value is one’s lifework.
- If we find satisfaction in the picture that emerges from the connected dots,
- if we find security in the apparent direction that the connecting seems to indicate,
- if I find comfort in seeing that my pattern is echoed in the patterns of our people, our history,
- and if the emerging picture reflects my faith in God--
Spiritual discourse is the give-and-take of my conscious interaction with the moments of my life. It is to be fully aware of the dots, to look for meaning in the way I connect one to the other, and satisfied if not excited about the picture that then emerges. In Gates of Prayer, my old Reform Shabbat siddur, is this meditation:
And artist in the course of painting will pause, lay aside the brush, step back from the canvas and consider what needs to be done, what direction is to be taken… As I hope to make my life a work of art, so I turn back to the canvas of life to paint the portrait of my highest self.
To be human is to make meaningful the pattern of my life’s dots. To be Jewish is to look for ways to merge my pattern into the larger, even universal, picture that is a broader canvas of dots—one that includes me in a picture of the Jewish community, one that enfolds us in God’s ultimate inclusive pattern.
On Needing Our Enemies Yom Kippur 2025
Earlier in our service this morning we read “You are slow to anger, ready to forgive. It is not the death of sinners that You seek, but that they should turn from their ways and live. Until the last day You wait for them, welcoming them as soon as they turn to You”.
It reminds me a little of that often spoken phrase “Hate the sin but love the sinner”. It has become something of a catch phrase among Christian (and now Jewish) fundamentalists referencing their LGBTQ folks. Though the quote is never found (for Christians) in the New Testament, or our Hebrew Scriptures, it does seem to be the basis for this Yom Kippur confident expectation of a compassionate God.
We’re all familiar with the verse from Leviticus (19:18) “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But interestingly, what immediately precedes it is God’s command to “not hate your kinsman in your heart.” It’s as if Leviticus wants us to realize that before we can learn to love our neighbors, we first have to struggle with rooting out hatred at home. But what is not found in these verses is if it is still okay to hate our enemies, of which we lately seem to have so many! Christianity apparently says ‘no, it’s not okay’. Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus saying “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44)”. Is ‘loving your enemy’ also a Jewish thing?
Nowhere in Hebrew Scriptures do we find “love your neighbor and also your enemy”. But Torah does teach “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or ass wandering, you must take it back to him. When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden and would refrain from raising it, you must, nevertheless, raise it with him” (Exodus 23:4–5). But if I have to help my enemy when he needs it, can I nevertheless still hate him?!
This past summer I read an article that highlighted the teaching of the 16th C mystic Rabbi Yehudah Loew known as the Maharal of Prague. He is best known from the folktale in which Rabbi Loew creates the golem, the clay figure that comes to life and wreaks havoc in the Prague ghetto. But in real life he is best known for his expansive commentary on the book of Exodus. In it he asks: “If Egypt was such an evil, wretched nation, how could it have been the very place where Israel, the holiest of nations, was formed?” He answers: “For one thing is activated by its opposite, for a thing cannot be activated by itself.” So Israel, he wrote, needed Egypt if they were to understand and appreciate the evil of slavery and oppression. The true nature of a thing is only fully known in relation to its opposite. He wrote: “When a good thing is known from its opposite, that is true knowledge.”
This notion that opposites inform one another, that we learn the true nature of things by contrasting them, goes all the way back to Aristotle and is reaffirmed by both Jewish and Muslim medieval scholars, including Maimonides. Applied here, the principle is that our enemies can serve as a reflection by which we may better understand ourselves. Rabbi Loew, however, wrote that while the two opposite forces may antagonize one another, they in fact, act on, “activate” each other to create a complete whole. Thus they are necessarily connected.
It means that not only may my enemy help me understand who I am, but more than that, my enemy holds some part of a greater truth that I do not. Thus my position represents only part of the total reality, which is a unified, harmonization of opposites. Rabbi Loew concludes by saying that evil too, is an important part of our existence. Why is there evil in this world? Because without it we would not, could not, fully understand or appreciate what it means to do the “good”.
From this it follows that we should, in some way, value our enemies. They exist as our other halves, our unexpected partners in this world. It does not, however, mean that we should love them, but neither will it serve us to dismiss them as worthless, or to waste energy hating them. Rabbi Loew challenges us with the proposition that we need our enemies, for they hold some part of the larger truth that we are missing. And if we could learn to identify and integrate that truth, it would enable us to come closer to repairing our world—which is our God-given responsibility.
I try, I really try to apply that concept to what is happening in Israel. But how does the horrendous and appalling reality of the death and destruction of so many, in any way help me to see how a just and moral outcome might be achieved? And it’s all bad there: Hamas terrorists, the West Bank extremist settlers, the nationalist Israeli political and religious right-wing, and the self-serving Netanyahu government.
I’m still enraged by the October 7 attack two years ago. Innocent Israelis slaughtered, butchered, and kidnapped; held captive, brutalized, raped and executed. And to what extent was and is Hamas wholly supported and cheered on by the general Palestinian public? But then, shouldn’t we also be appalled by the condition of the displaced Palestinian families, now two years later living what can only be a frightful, horrific existence?
And then I’m equally enraged at the Netanyahu government, which has for years turned a blind eye to Hamas activity in Gaza, allowing Hamas to flourish as opposition to Abbas and his West Bank Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu wants a weakened, powerless Palestinian Authority that would never be able to secure support for a Two-State Solution because Netanyahu and his radical rightwing are opposed to the possibility (much less the creation!) of an independent Palestinian state. The Netanyahu government has its own version of “From the river to the sea”, which explains the government allowing Settler attacks on Palestinian villages, its proposed occupation of Gaza, and the expected annexation of the West Bank..
Rabbi Yehudah Loew, in 16th C Prague would tell us we can’t hate the enemy because what they do and who they are is ying to our yang. Until and unless we know, understand and can appreciate the human capacity for cruel, brutal and vicious behavior, we can never fully know, understand or sincerely appreciate the ultimate importance of justice, righteousness, kindness and humility.
And because I am Zionist, a supporter of Israel and her absolute right to a safe and secure existence, I agree with Walt Kelly’s Pogo who I quoted on Rosh Hashanah evening: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Netanyahu and his government have unknowingly spotlighted for us not only the importance of the original ideals with which Israel was founded, but the ease with which they can so quickly be dismissed.
The issues in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are clearly seen in their stark reality: the wanton cruelty of Hamas, the anguish and misery of the Palestinians, the desperate pleas from the hostage families, the destructive intentions of Netanyahu and his government, and the malicious raids by the West Bank Settlers. In so many ways ‘they are us’. And Rabbi Loew would tell us that they “activate” our morality, that recognizing their reality, we know and understand what we must do in response. The question for us of course is what can we do here, on the other side of the world, when action has to be, must be, decisively taken over there?!
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, I said that we must stand up, up front, “loud and proud” in the face of America’s growing antipathy and hostility to Jews and Jewish institutions. To our neighbors we must clearly present ourselves as Americans who belong here, different from them in some ways but equal in all ways. And so when questioned about “Israel”, we must be equally clear that we hate the sin but love the sinner.
We may not be directly able to change the attitudes of many of our neighbors, but we can stand tall and be firm in who we are, as Jews and as Americans. And we may not be directly able to bring sanity and morality to the Middle East, but we can be clear in declaring what we know is right and what is wrong.
Our Jewish Tradition declares “do justice, righteousness and lovingkindness”, and the other side of that coin sharpens the focus, and the clarity, and the immediacy of that demand. On Erev Rosh Hashanah I concluded with Hillel’s words of almost 2000 years ago:
Im ain ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Uch-shanai l’atzmi ma ani? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
V’im lo achshav, aymatai? And if not now—when?
Yizkor/Memorial Message Yom Kippur 2025
Gertrude Housman, an American 20th C poet wrote:
I came into the world without being asked
and when the time for dying comes
I shall not be consulted;
but between the boundaries of birth and death
lies the dominion of choice:
to be a doer or a dreamer,
to be a lifter or a leaner,
to speak out or remain silent,
to extend a hand in friendship
or to look the other way;
to feel the sufferings of others
or to be callous and insensitive.
these are the choices;
It is in the choosing
that my measure as a person
Is determined.
On Yom Kippur we are urged to be totally honest with ourselves. We’re told that our focus these last 10 days is to be inward, private, self-reflective. But on this one, single, moment during these “Days of Awe”, our thoughts turn outward, remembering, honoring the memories of our friends and family members who have died. And in remembering them, in all the ways their lives touched ours, the choices they made have made all the difference in how we see them, hear them, and remember them now.
Today, to remember, lizkor in Hebrew, should also mean “to learn”. Let these names and the lives of these remembered family and friends, teach us the singularly important lesson that our choices, day-in and day-out, choices routine and remarkable, determine not only who we are, but how we will be remembered.
Zichronam livracha, may their memories be a blessing, and may we leave memories that will be a blessing to those we leave behind.