Holding On To The Particular - Yom Kippur 5786
What makes us distinct will maintain us as Jews, and continue to bring our light to the world.
(This is the fourth and final installment in the “Holiness in Time” High Holiday series. If you have not read the first three, you might want to start here.)
The first observant Jewish astronaut was training for years with NASA, and finally was selected to go up in the Space Shuttle for a week-long mission. When he returned, he joined a press conference with his non-Jewish fellow astronauts. When asked about the mission, each of them went on about how wonderful the experience was: to see the Earth from above, to experience zero-gravity, to get a view of the sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes as the shuttle circled the Earth sixteen times each day.
When the Jewish astronaut is asked about his experience, he says, “It was awful. Every hour and a half: tefillin on tefillin off, tefillin on, tefillin off…”
Our theme over these High Holidays has been holiness in time. We have discussed how Jewish practice gives you more time, how time is the essential dimension of Jewish life, connecting us across our history whenever we do anything Jewish, and how there is not enough time today to raise Jewish children.
Today, we are going to explore how change over time might work against Jewish practice and Jewish life, and how we must put all of our chips on distinctly Jewish tradition if we are going to sustain the Jewish future.
In other words, we have to focus on what is particularly Jewish, and not merely universal. Ours is a rich and thoughtful tradition, which we continue to interpret and struggle with. In recent centuries, and particularly in the last several decades in liberal democracies that have accepted the Jews as equals, many of us have been inclined to bend Jewish practice to comport with the non-Jewish society’s wider values. And perhaps it has come time for us to acknowledge that this is not always the best choice. In order to sustain ourselves and our tradition, we must hold up that which is particular to Judaism, what makes our heritage different.
***
Some of you may remember that eight years ago on Rosh HaShanah I created a massive timeline of Jewish history of the last 3,000 years on the back wall here. There are only a handful of cultures in this world that can look back that far. Islam and Christianity, hugely successful religions which together account for more than half of the world’s population, are both less than 2,000 years old. We are few in number, about 0.2% of the world, but we have been around a long time.
Now, we might propose several reasons as to why we are still here, particularly in light of historic anti-Judaism, which goes pretty far back, and the multiple genocidal attempts to eliminate us throughout our history.
The most obvious possibility is that, as our traditional story tells us, we have a berit, a covenant with God, that stretches back all the way to Avraham Avinu and Sarah Imeinu, Abraham our Patriarch and Sarah our Matriarch. This berit, wherein we keep the mitzvot and God provides us with protection and all manner of good things, is still in play more than three millennia later, and the fact that the Jewish people are still here, even in small numbers, is a testament to its validity.
A second reason is that we have throughout our history had a strong sense of community – one which non-Jews have in some sense helped us maintain by excluding us from their society and institutions – and that these strong communal bonds have helped maintain us through the high and low points of our history.
But in my estimation, the most likely reason we are still here is a variant of both of these: commitment to traditional observance of our rituals, including things like communal prayer, lifecycle events, kashrut and Shabbat, and of course learning the words of Torah and all the commentary and wisdom which flows from it.
In 1990, the Dalai Lama invited a group of rabbis and Jewish teachers to his home in exile in Dharamsala, India, where the devotees of Tibetan Buddhism keep their traditions alive after having been expelled by China from their historical homeland. He wanted to discover the secret of how the Jews had survived 2,000 years in exile. The story is captured in Rodger Kamenetz’s book, The Jew in the Lotus. And the simple answer is that the Jews never gave up on our history, our traditions, and our yearning for return.
“More than Jews have kept Shabbat,” said the early-20th century cultural Zionist writer Aḥad Ha’am, “Shabbat has kept the Jews.” Our framework of tradition has enabled us to thrive through thick and thin, through the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Shoah, right through to the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
Congregation Beth Shalom, the first congregation formed in Squirrel Hill, was established in 1917, and met for some time in a store front on Forbes. When, in 1923, the growing congregation planned to build its first building, right here at the corner of Beacon and Shady, Rabbi Goodman Rose reflected on this so-called “Community House,” noting the fact that it was not initially a synagogue:
We in this section are laying the foundations for a new Jewish community, distinctive, and in certain respects different from those from which we had come. We must organize our Judaism and mold our spiritual structures. What plans have we to follow? No set rules, no standard patterns, no fixed precedents are available for our guidance. We must think out our way step by step and act by act — this only being our unswerving principle, that not an iota of our Judaism is to be sacrificed.
In 1923, all options were available as to how this Community House would be used – not merely for services, but for all sorts of communal gatherings. This was a new model that had become popular at the time, in the spirit of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s Jewish Center in New York, founded a few years earlier: the idea of the synagogue as community center. And yet, as Rabbi Rose pointed out, no matter the range of uses of the building, the essence of Jewish life is Jewish practice, and that is what holds our community together and will do so moving forward.
The key to our survival – to coming through so many eras and places of persecution and oppression and antisemitism – has been our commitment to Jewish tradition in its entirety. Not fabulous bar mitzvah parties. Not an exclusive focus on social action or tiqqun olam. Not remembering the Shoah so that it won’t happen again. Not having state-of-the-art workout facilities at the JCC (although I do appreciate them!).
Rather, it’s the day-to-day of living Jewishly. It is teaching our children Torah, and blessing them at Friday night dinner. It is coming regularly to synagogue. It’s hearing the shofar on Rosh HaShanah and gathering family for Pesah sedarim. It’s being there for an aufruf, when we call a bride and groom to the Torah before their wedding; it’s being there for shiv’ah for a neighbor who is grieving, and offering words of comfort. It’s helping to distribute Mishloaḥ Manot for Purim. It’s the ḥevreh qadisha / burial society, and the volunteers who step forward to take upon themselves such a holy task. It’s making sure that a person who shows up to Friday Night Kabbalat Shabbat services is invited to dinner. It’s visiting those who are ill, and I want to thank all those who did for me when I broke my leg in May.
It is understanding all the ways that the Torah teaches us to be better people, and to create a better society marked by respectful coexistence. Just a few tiny examples:
When the Torah says, “Do not put a stumbling block in front of a blind person,” (Vayiqra / Leviticus 19:14) it can certainly be understood literally, but could just as easily be read according to Rashi’s interpretation, that the Torah is not necessarily speaking of a person who cannot see, but rather of someone who may be “blind in a certain way.” That is, we all must be sensitive to the blind spots of others and not take advantage of them.
When the Torah says, “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering, you must take it back to him,” (Shemot / Exodus 23:4), it could be just talking about farm animals, or it could be that the Torah is reminding us that we must treat all people with respect, even those with whom we vehemently disagree. The Mishnah, in Pirqei Avot, tells us וֶהֱוֵי מְקַבֵּל אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם בְּסֵבֶר פָּנִים יָפוֹת - to receive ALL people with a pleasant countenance, even your enemies.
When the Torah forbids us from cutting down fruit trees when laying siege to a city (Devarim / Deuteronomy 20:19-20), it could be speaking only of times of war. But Maimonides teaches us that this means that we can never waste anything of value found in God’s Creation. We should therefore always be conscious of how we use and/or abuse the materials God has given us.
And there are so many other ways in which the Torah has given us guidance like this, which has sustained us through tradition as we have gone about our lives across continents and millennia.
***
I have been here in Pittsburgh for ten years now (and we’re celebrating that on Nov. 22!), and I think you know that I am something of a traditionalist, but with an eye to some contemporary changes. I grew up in the Conservative movement, and I am still here, because I think that what we do is exactly what Judaism and Jewish practice should be: tradition and change.
And you know what? The formula that we have here at Beth Shalom is working. We are, I am told, unusual among Conservative synagogues in that we have maintained our morning and evening minyanim, and I am grateful for that every day. You may also know that our USY chapter president, Daphne Macedonia, is also the International President of USY, which is a testament not only to Daphne, but also to this community for having helped her grow into a Jewish leader.
And the formula for success is, as they say, not rocket science: it is to do exactly what Rabbi Goodman Rose urged Beth Shalom to do in 1923: not to sacrifice even an iota of our Judaism.
In his critique of contemporary Judaism, Tablets Shattered, which I also mentioned last night, Joshua Leifer describes some of the edgier innovations of Judaism, put forward by liberal rabbis, which are a product of the recent shift of emphasis from the group to the self, and the new social movements which have emerged in recent decades. He writes the following (p. 271):
In their deconstructive ambition, [these rabbis] appear to push for consistency. They seem to ask that if there can be fluidity in gender, no longer understood as dual in nature, then why can there not be fluidity between gentile and Jew? If the program is practice without particularism, then is it not such a stretch to decouple religious ritual from fixed and mutually obligating community? Why can’t Judaism be syncretic, multireligious (Bu-Jew or Hin-Jew), nontheistic or multi-theistic, a performance or play, and why does it matter if the people doing all this are Jews by birth or Jewish by choice, converted or unconverted?
Then, very Jewishly, he answers his own questions with other questions:
But there is a part of me that wonders, were all these changes to occur, would this still be Judaism? That seems to be the basic, unresolved question facing the most experimental, radical edge of non-Orthodox Judaism… What if the rupture with precedent… leads not to a reformulation of Judaism but, in a way, to its supersession? Likewise, at what point will the rejection of basic religious categories – and there are perhaps none as fundamental as gentile and Jew – mean that the lived ritual practice of many self-identified American Jews has transmogrified into… something else?
Now, I know that Leifer’s questions amount to a kind of slippery slope argument, and anyway, Rabbi, why are you mentioning this stuff, when this is not an issue at Beth Shalom?
I mention this because it is essential for us to remember that what has always held us together is living Jewishly, and although we have always absorbed customs and ideas and melodies from the non-Jewish world around us, we have also maintained our practices – praying together, studying together, living in close proximity together – for millennia. And regardless of what our individual practices have been, we have always upheld a communal standard of Jewish Law/ halakhah which has kept us Jewish, not only regarding personal status – conversion and marriage – but also keeping Shabbat and keeping kosher and upholding mitzvot. We do not use Primanti’s to cater our kiddush, and we do not take selfies with the Torah on Shabbat and holidays.
And these traditions have sustained us for all that time, and have brought us to this point.
Some amount of innovation is always a good idea. The Conservative movement has widely embraced the idea of egalitarianism. That’s why you are seated together today, and why both men and women lead us in services here at Beth Shalom. It’s a relatively new idea in Jewish life, driven by Western social change. This is a very good thing, and at the religious services committee we are still discussing ways to engage more people in Jewish ritual – inviting more women into the mitzvot of tallit and tefillin, for example – so that we might continue expanding participation in the traditional rituals which have sustained us for so long.
But, as Leifer suggests, there are limits to how far we can bend traditional Judaism before it breaks. And I think we must continue to double down on some of the particularistic aspects of Jewish living.
Our journey to America, with all its freedom and modernity, encouraged us to limit our Jewish expression. Sarah Hurwitz is a former speechwriter for Michelle Obama who rediscovered Judaism as an adult. In her new book, As a Jew (you can listen to her discuss it here), she makes the argument that Jewish practice became attenuated due to antisemitism and the desire of Jews to fit in with the wider society.
In our journey to these shores of freedom, we shed many of the particularist aspects of Judaism – traditional observance of many holidays, keeping kosher, wearing kippot in public, learning Talmud, etc. – and what we have inherited in today’s world is a mere remnant.
Hurwitz described the Judaism of her youth as consisting of nothing more than “three boring holidays and one fun one.” And she accuses the Jewish world of adopting universal values – defining mitzvot as good deeds meant to “repair the world,” for example – in place of traditional Jewish living and practice. She writes:
I now understand how centuries of lies about my tradition had driven me away from it; how lenses imposed on it by others had distorted and demeaned it; how my ignorance and arrogance were in part the result of a generations-long, persecution- and trauma-induced spiritual erasure.
But all of the richness of Jewish life is there for you. Hurwitz’s tale is one of learning to appreciate only in adulthood how powerful and rich the particulars of our tradition are: all of the ways in which mitzvot teach us to respect time and space, to elevate our responsibilities to one another as humans: the essential mitzvah of tzedaqah, providing charity for those in need. The essential responsibilities of comforting the mourner, of visiting the sick, of celebrating with bride and groom, of supporting your synagogue. The fundamental precept of asking for forgiveness at this time of year.
The universalism of recent centuries was important to us to help us become citizens of the modern world. But the true value of your Jewish heritage is in focusing on what our tradition teaches as the most fundamental aspects of life: learning, prayer, holy times.
And the time has come for you to reclaim them. This is the particularistic formula which has maintained us for thousands of years. What makes us distinct will maintain us as Jews, and continue to bring our light to the world.
***
I have spoken over these four High Holiday sermons about how our changing relationship with time is altering our relationship with our heritage and practice and raising our children, and not always for the better.
And if there is one thing I want you to take away from all of this, it is that our tradition is extraordinarily rich and valuable, and that letting go of it simply because we do not have enough time to devote to Jewish life will be a loss not only for our children and grandchildren, but also for the world.
No matter how much technology changes us, no matter how much our lives become saturated with AI or God knows what else, we must remain stubbornly committed and proud of what we do and who we are. And we must recommit to being particular – to revel in doing those things that make us different and keep us Jewish.
Not to cutting back, but to building up. Not to shortening or lessening, but to enriching.
Time has not been our friend in this regard. But If we truly want to find more meaning and holiness in our lives, we shall surely find it in devoting time to Judaism, Jewish life, and Jewish practice.
