Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 11, 2024 16:33:55 GMT
In Talmud, God tells Moses about a great sage in the future called Rabbi Akiva who will expound on every crown of every letter in Torah. Moses asks to see him, so God invites Moses to turn around. Moses finds himself sitting in Akiva’s classroom but as he listens, he does not understand a word of what is being taught, and his strength wanes. When a student asks Akiva from where he derived that particular lesson, Akiva replies, “It is a law given to Moses from Sinai.” And only then is Moses’ mind put at ease.
Since Rosh Hashanah, I’ve been sharing the idea of shattered paradigms, of how sometimes Judaism quickly and dramatically changes, sometimes as a result of our choices and sometimes as a result of the choices of others. I’ve shared the need for us to acknowledge that we are now in a time in which notable change to our Jewish practice and theology is necessary for the continuation of Judaism, including last night when I asked us to reconsider the gender paradigm that has for so long defined Judaism. And all the shattered paradigms might seem rather dramatic to us but the story of Moses in Akiva’s lecture hall shows us that what we can easily mistake for a fairly monolithic tradition has, in fact, always undergone dramatic changes, to the point that Moses doesn’t recognize the Judaism that’s being taught in his name over a thousand years after him. Moses doesn’t recognize the Judaism that we know. That’s extraordinary. Moses wouldn’t have known of the High Holy Day liturgy like the 12th century Unetaneh Tokef prayer or the Great Aleinu which is first mentioned in the 3rd century but is attributed to Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, which is after Moses died. He wouldn’t have known the Mourner’s Kaddish or Kol Nidre which are both Aramaic insertions into our service revealing their origins far later than Moses. Moses wouldn’t have known of any regular prayer services, in fact, because they replaced sacrifice after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. Moses wouldn’t have known of Chanukah which happened a thousand years after him, or of the Seder service which was created after that, or of the ritual of tashlich which was a medieval religious innovation. He wouldn’t have known of apples dipped in honey, or even bagels… Moses never ate a bagel! But we know that all of these things are profoundly Jewish even though they appeared in Judaism over time. We don’t need to pretend that Moses knew them all and secretly passed down the information to others to reveal over countless generations, as some Jews claim. Religious innovation, creativity, and transformation is profoundly Jewish. In fact, it is only religious innovation, creativity and transformation that has kept Judaism alive. But…. those things can also scary. They can be uncomfortable.
In the last few decades in particular, Jews around the world have become very comfortable. We’ve established our places of worship, we’ve made strong connections with local and national politicians, with interfaith leaders and with academics. Our voices have been lifted up in media. We knew that we were never totally safe, which is why we have had security for so long, but we at least felt comfortable with our place in society because we had become certain that society had, on the whole, learned to appreciate our values, our opinions, our very being, and that society would continue to progress. The last year has changed that entirely. The paradigm of safety, of comfort, of trust, the belief that society had progressed with respect to the Jews has for most of us been utterly shattered since we were here last Yom Kippur. Time and again over the last year, crucial allies have revealed themselves to have been only allies of convenience when we supported their cause. Worse, we came to learn that anti-semitism had not gone away - it was just simmering beneath the surface of regular communal discourse waiting for an excuse to gush forth. We were vilified – I was vilified – for even daring to support the right of the State of Israel to exist and for critiquing all sides in differing ways in the current conflict. In the last year alone, for example, I’ve been accused by strangers, friends and colleagues (now former friends and former colleagues), both Jewish and non-Jewish, here in Santa Fe and beyond, by members and by non-members, of being a liar, of being a baby-killer, of being antisemitic, of being islamophobic, and even of being someone who supports white supremacy! And I know that I’m not alone in our community having faced such monstrous accusations. In the last year, I have been involved in multiple conversations with people who even tried to redefine the term anti-semitism as not actually being about Jews! During that time, many local human rights advocates and religious leaders suddenly only cared about human rights on one side of a terrible conflict. Social justice advocates from local environmental groups to reproductive rights groups went way beyond their expertise and posted support for one side in a conflict about which they clearly knew next to nothing. School children in our community started to experience anti-semitism in ways that they had never experienced before, including being shown pictures of ovens for them to choose which one they would be put in. The modern post-Enlightenment paradigm of Jewish comfort, our sense of stability as Jews, which was totally predicated on a belief in progress, has been totally and utterly shattered yet again, and we are living among the shards, trying to process what has happened, and trying to work out how to even talk to each other about what has happened. And let’s be clear, obviously we are also in the middle of a huge paradigm shift regarding the State of Israel, that we are all profoundly wrestling with. This year has been so painful not just because of what is happening, but in watching members and friends argue about it because there’s so much pain and anger. And the truth is that I tried to write a sermon about that but I failed to find words that might bring people together. Every time I wrote something, I thought of someone who might take offence or be angered by it and I found myself paralyzed. And I think that paralysis is something we as a community would do well to really think about. So, instead, this sermon is just about the pain of this year that we’ve all experienced.
This is not, as you might have guessed, a comforting sermon. Yom Kippur isn’t meant to be a day of comfort. Reading our High Holy Day liturgy metaphorically instead of literally, I don’t personally believe that there is an actual book of life into which our names are written. Instead, I believe that the point of the High Holy Day liturgy is to use these metaphors to instill in us a feeling of peril, a sense of profound discomfort, which then leads to personal change. Think of the way that we beg to be written into the Book of Life and then to be sealed into it, the way we rush and plead before the Gates of Repentance close. There’s desperation there. During Unetaneh Tokef, we read of those who die in natural and unnatural ways, and we realize that we were not among them this year, but we could be next year. It’s scary. But then every year after Yom Kippur, we quickly brush aside that feeling of insecurity, we sit in the Succah and we chill out. Very quickly, another year passes and suddenly we’re clambering to atone again. That’s not how we’re meant to be because the issue for us isn’t really how we behave during the ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – it’s how we behave during the entire year from Yom Kippur to Rosh Hashanah. The insecurity we feel today is meant to last into the rest of the year, it’s just magnified today.
Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od – the whole world really is a very narrow bridge, especially for us. We live on an eternal precipice, but we forgot. We got comfortable. We pretended to be like everyone else, we started to think like everyone else. We believed that the world was progressing, that we were safe. But being Jewish means living on the bridge, seeing that the world is precariously balanced, and that one good or one bad deed by anyone may shift the balance for the entire world. We have gone from the comfort of progress to the realization of tipping points. The world teeters on edge. It always has, but we forgot how quickly it can tip. So, we reassured ourselves and the next generation that everything will be fine, that our society will always progress, that even if the present isn’t wonderful, the future will always by definition be good. Of course, then, if we held that to be true, we would start to despair when the social advances of yesteryear were dismantled, and when anti-semitism reared its head once more. We bought into a pseudo-religion of the certainty of progress, we taught it as the overarching paradigm not just of our society today but of history as a whole. Now, though, we realize that the guarantee of progress was a comforting lie, a convenient thought paradigm that was utterly predicated on the unlimited technological abuse of the Earth from which we benefited. Now we watch as society clambers to make sense of that shattered paradigm, as well as a multitude of others shattering paradigms such as patriarchy and racism. We in the liberal Jewish community are fine with shattering the paradigms of patriarchy and racism, but we were not expecting to have the paradigm of the certainty of progress shattered because it was an essential underlying assumption of liberal education. Yes, there have been many advances in our society in the last few hundred years – of course there have - but those advances came at a very heavy cost because many of them stole from the promise of a better future that they were themselves there to create. Depression, despair, hopelessness… all of these feelings have reported massive increases worldwide in the last couple of decades as the certainty of a better future gives way to the terrifying prospect that a better future is not guaranteed… it’s something we have to fight for.
That feeling of not knowing which way the world will go – a feeling that very many people around the world have right now and will have at least until November 5th and maybe beyond – that fear, that uncertainty, that knot in your stomach… that’s actually the root of Judaism because that’s what inspires us to act. We are not here to be comfortable, we are here to bring about redemption. We’re here to take that uncertainty that we feel, that existential dread, and turn it into action. But we got too comfortable, too certain that the world was going to be fine, too sure that most other people and organizations shared our values, so we sat back and enjoyed our lives, we basked in our comforts believing that after millennia of brutal oppression, our people had finally earned them. But we are not here to be comfortable, we are here to bring about redemption. This year has felt rather like the moment in Fiddler on the Roof when the Cossacks engage in a pogrom during Tzeitel’s wedding. Everything had been fine – not great but fine – people were getting on with their lives, and then suddenly terrifying violence from outside. After the pogrom, Tevye looks heavenward with a look to God that asks, “Why?” Why? Because that’s our job, not to get too comfortable. It’s our job to live on the tipping point - that’s the Jewish task. We all are, have always been and will always both a light to the nations and a Fiddler on the Roof, trying to change the world while also just “trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our neck.” While those around us get comfortable, we have a job to do, and when we forget about that sacred task, the rest of the world has a disturbing habit of reminding us of it in the worst way possible. And let me be clear that this is not a sermon about Jews being better than the rest of the world - I am, of course, not saying that. What I am saying, though, is that to be religiously Jewish means having a spirituality that inspires us never to get comfortable in our secular society’s paradigms and the lies that we tell ourselves to enforce those paradigms.
So, we have to choose, right now, this Yom Kippur, whether this is going to be a year of comfort or a year of helping to bring about redemption. We sought comfort in the wrong place, and it left us feeling like Moses in Akiva’s classroom, confused and with our strength waning. And here’s the really interesting continuation of the story of Moses in Akiva’s classroom. Moses returns to God and asks, “You have a man such as this and yet you chose to give the Torah through me?” to which God responds, “Be silent, this is according to My plan.” In other words, you don’t choose to be chosen or not, you already are. We don’t get to be here today and then return and pretend to be like the rest of society. We’re here because we’re different and we’re different because we’re here. We’re here on Yom Kippur because we have a sacred task, no matter the cost to ourselves, as the story of Moses and Akiva continues. Moses asks God, “You have shown me his Torah, now show me his reward.” God tells Moses to turn around and Moses sees Akiva’s flesh being weighed in the marketplace. He turns to God and cries, “This is his Torah and this is his reward?!?” to which God replies the same phrase, “Be silent, this is according to My plan.”
Moses doesn’t get it. He’s still set in the paradigm of working and then receiving a subsequent reward, which frames the theology of the Book of Deuteronomy from the Five Books of… well, you know…! To Moses, the reward, the thing that comforts, comes after the task. Moses expects reward after the labor, because he doesn’t realize the sacred task is the reward. Our reward, our comfort, is knowing that we can step outside… that society needs us to step outside of its own paradigm to gently critique it and improve it. That’s what it means to be or lagoyim – “a light unto the nations” – to follow our sacred task by not getting too comfortable in society’s paradigms and instead gently critiquing and improving them for all. We are the Hebrews, the Ivrim, the people who transcend society’s paradigms, the people who stand outside and often get vilified for it but do so nonetheless. We step outside not despite it being uncomfortable but because it is uncomfortable. We question our society’s paradigms not because we are exceptional but because we believe there can be more – it is our stepping outside that is exceptional, not us ourselves. And in Judaism we do it in a particular way – not by shutting ourselves off in a cave but by repenting, by atoning, which means by questioning ourselves and questioning our society that shapes us.
This is why despair is not a Jewish thing. If you look at the state of the world and despair, you’re still locked into a paradigm of hope being connected to the promise of a better future. In Judaism, though, we look at the state of the world, of our society, and we roll up our sleeves in an act of hope. So long as we have the power to improve the world, we cannot despair. So, that leads us to one final question for this season – When I look at the world around me, what am I going to change? When I look at the world around me, what am I going to change? That could be something that we change about the world, that could be something that we change about ourselves, or it could be both. For our teshuvah to be effective, meaningful, real today, there has to be an answer to that question. It’s an uncomfortable question, and thank God for that discomfort.
So, may we all experience the discomfort that comes before teshuvah. May we on this Yom Kippur embrace the discomfort that leads us to action, to change, to improving ourselves and the world. May we never give in to despair but instead create hope by envisioning and creating newer, healthier paradigms for everyone. May we be divergent in our thinking and being not to be contrary or to feed our egos but to illuminate a new way of being for all as our Divine mission. And in this year of 5785, may we support our sacred community so that we may support each other in this, the most essential sacred task, and let us say, Amen.
Since Rosh Hashanah, I’ve been sharing the idea of shattered paradigms, of how sometimes Judaism quickly and dramatically changes, sometimes as a result of our choices and sometimes as a result of the choices of others. I’ve shared the need for us to acknowledge that we are now in a time in which notable change to our Jewish practice and theology is necessary for the continuation of Judaism, including last night when I asked us to reconsider the gender paradigm that has for so long defined Judaism. And all the shattered paradigms might seem rather dramatic to us but the story of Moses in Akiva’s lecture hall shows us that what we can easily mistake for a fairly monolithic tradition has, in fact, always undergone dramatic changes, to the point that Moses doesn’t recognize the Judaism that’s being taught in his name over a thousand years after him. Moses doesn’t recognize the Judaism that we know. That’s extraordinary. Moses wouldn’t have known of the High Holy Day liturgy like the 12th century Unetaneh Tokef prayer or the Great Aleinu which is first mentioned in the 3rd century but is attributed to Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, which is after Moses died. He wouldn’t have known the Mourner’s Kaddish or Kol Nidre which are both Aramaic insertions into our service revealing their origins far later than Moses. Moses wouldn’t have known of any regular prayer services, in fact, because they replaced sacrifice after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. Moses wouldn’t have known of Chanukah which happened a thousand years after him, or of the Seder service which was created after that, or of the ritual of tashlich which was a medieval religious innovation. He wouldn’t have known of apples dipped in honey, or even bagels… Moses never ate a bagel! But we know that all of these things are profoundly Jewish even though they appeared in Judaism over time. We don’t need to pretend that Moses knew them all and secretly passed down the information to others to reveal over countless generations, as some Jews claim. Religious innovation, creativity, and transformation is profoundly Jewish. In fact, it is only religious innovation, creativity and transformation that has kept Judaism alive. But…. those things can also scary. They can be uncomfortable.
In the last few decades in particular, Jews around the world have become very comfortable. We’ve established our places of worship, we’ve made strong connections with local and national politicians, with interfaith leaders and with academics. Our voices have been lifted up in media. We knew that we were never totally safe, which is why we have had security for so long, but we at least felt comfortable with our place in society because we had become certain that society had, on the whole, learned to appreciate our values, our opinions, our very being, and that society would continue to progress. The last year has changed that entirely. The paradigm of safety, of comfort, of trust, the belief that society had progressed with respect to the Jews has for most of us been utterly shattered since we were here last Yom Kippur. Time and again over the last year, crucial allies have revealed themselves to have been only allies of convenience when we supported their cause. Worse, we came to learn that anti-semitism had not gone away - it was just simmering beneath the surface of regular communal discourse waiting for an excuse to gush forth. We were vilified – I was vilified – for even daring to support the right of the State of Israel to exist and for critiquing all sides in differing ways in the current conflict. In the last year alone, for example, I’ve been accused by strangers, friends and colleagues (now former friends and former colleagues), both Jewish and non-Jewish, here in Santa Fe and beyond, by members and by non-members, of being a liar, of being a baby-killer, of being antisemitic, of being islamophobic, and even of being someone who supports white supremacy! And I know that I’m not alone in our community having faced such monstrous accusations. In the last year, I have been involved in multiple conversations with people who even tried to redefine the term anti-semitism as not actually being about Jews! During that time, many local human rights advocates and religious leaders suddenly only cared about human rights on one side of a terrible conflict. Social justice advocates from local environmental groups to reproductive rights groups went way beyond their expertise and posted support for one side in a conflict about which they clearly knew next to nothing. School children in our community started to experience anti-semitism in ways that they had never experienced before, including being shown pictures of ovens for them to choose which one they would be put in. The modern post-Enlightenment paradigm of Jewish comfort, our sense of stability as Jews, which was totally predicated on a belief in progress, has been totally and utterly shattered yet again, and we are living among the shards, trying to process what has happened, and trying to work out how to even talk to each other about what has happened. And let’s be clear, obviously we are also in the middle of a huge paradigm shift regarding the State of Israel, that we are all profoundly wrestling with. This year has been so painful not just because of what is happening, but in watching members and friends argue about it because there’s so much pain and anger. And the truth is that I tried to write a sermon about that but I failed to find words that might bring people together. Every time I wrote something, I thought of someone who might take offence or be angered by it and I found myself paralyzed. And I think that paralysis is something we as a community would do well to really think about. So, instead, this sermon is just about the pain of this year that we’ve all experienced.
This is not, as you might have guessed, a comforting sermon. Yom Kippur isn’t meant to be a day of comfort. Reading our High Holy Day liturgy metaphorically instead of literally, I don’t personally believe that there is an actual book of life into which our names are written. Instead, I believe that the point of the High Holy Day liturgy is to use these metaphors to instill in us a feeling of peril, a sense of profound discomfort, which then leads to personal change. Think of the way that we beg to be written into the Book of Life and then to be sealed into it, the way we rush and plead before the Gates of Repentance close. There’s desperation there. During Unetaneh Tokef, we read of those who die in natural and unnatural ways, and we realize that we were not among them this year, but we could be next year. It’s scary. But then every year after Yom Kippur, we quickly brush aside that feeling of insecurity, we sit in the Succah and we chill out. Very quickly, another year passes and suddenly we’re clambering to atone again. That’s not how we’re meant to be because the issue for us isn’t really how we behave during the ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – it’s how we behave during the entire year from Yom Kippur to Rosh Hashanah. The insecurity we feel today is meant to last into the rest of the year, it’s just magnified today.
Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od – the whole world really is a very narrow bridge, especially for us. We live on an eternal precipice, but we forgot. We got comfortable. We pretended to be like everyone else, we started to think like everyone else. We believed that the world was progressing, that we were safe. But being Jewish means living on the bridge, seeing that the world is precariously balanced, and that one good or one bad deed by anyone may shift the balance for the entire world. We have gone from the comfort of progress to the realization of tipping points. The world teeters on edge. It always has, but we forgot how quickly it can tip. So, we reassured ourselves and the next generation that everything will be fine, that our society will always progress, that even if the present isn’t wonderful, the future will always by definition be good. Of course, then, if we held that to be true, we would start to despair when the social advances of yesteryear were dismantled, and when anti-semitism reared its head once more. We bought into a pseudo-religion of the certainty of progress, we taught it as the overarching paradigm not just of our society today but of history as a whole. Now, though, we realize that the guarantee of progress was a comforting lie, a convenient thought paradigm that was utterly predicated on the unlimited technological abuse of the Earth from which we benefited. Now we watch as society clambers to make sense of that shattered paradigm, as well as a multitude of others shattering paradigms such as patriarchy and racism. We in the liberal Jewish community are fine with shattering the paradigms of patriarchy and racism, but we were not expecting to have the paradigm of the certainty of progress shattered because it was an essential underlying assumption of liberal education. Yes, there have been many advances in our society in the last few hundred years – of course there have - but those advances came at a very heavy cost because many of them stole from the promise of a better future that they were themselves there to create. Depression, despair, hopelessness… all of these feelings have reported massive increases worldwide in the last couple of decades as the certainty of a better future gives way to the terrifying prospect that a better future is not guaranteed… it’s something we have to fight for.
That feeling of not knowing which way the world will go – a feeling that very many people around the world have right now and will have at least until November 5th and maybe beyond – that fear, that uncertainty, that knot in your stomach… that’s actually the root of Judaism because that’s what inspires us to act. We are not here to be comfortable, we are here to bring about redemption. We’re here to take that uncertainty that we feel, that existential dread, and turn it into action. But we got too comfortable, too certain that the world was going to be fine, too sure that most other people and organizations shared our values, so we sat back and enjoyed our lives, we basked in our comforts believing that after millennia of brutal oppression, our people had finally earned them. But we are not here to be comfortable, we are here to bring about redemption. This year has felt rather like the moment in Fiddler on the Roof when the Cossacks engage in a pogrom during Tzeitel’s wedding. Everything had been fine – not great but fine – people were getting on with their lives, and then suddenly terrifying violence from outside. After the pogrom, Tevye looks heavenward with a look to God that asks, “Why?” Why? Because that’s our job, not to get too comfortable. It’s our job to live on the tipping point - that’s the Jewish task. We all are, have always been and will always both a light to the nations and a Fiddler on the Roof, trying to change the world while also just “trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our neck.” While those around us get comfortable, we have a job to do, and when we forget about that sacred task, the rest of the world has a disturbing habit of reminding us of it in the worst way possible. And let me be clear that this is not a sermon about Jews being better than the rest of the world - I am, of course, not saying that. What I am saying, though, is that to be religiously Jewish means having a spirituality that inspires us never to get comfortable in our secular society’s paradigms and the lies that we tell ourselves to enforce those paradigms.
So, we have to choose, right now, this Yom Kippur, whether this is going to be a year of comfort or a year of helping to bring about redemption. We sought comfort in the wrong place, and it left us feeling like Moses in Akiva’s classroom, confused and with our strength waning. And here’s the really interesting continuation of the story of Moses in Akiva’s classroom. Moses returns to God and asks, “You have a man such as this and yet you chose to give the Torah through me?” to which God responds, “Be silent, this is according to My plan.” In other words, you don’t choose to be chosen or not, you already are. We don’t get to be here today and then return and pretend to be like the rest of society. We’re here because we’re different and we’re different because we’re here. We’re here on Yom Kippur because we have a sacred task, no matter the cost to ourselves, as the story of Moses and Akiva continues. Moses asks God, “You have shown me his Torah, now show me his reward.” God tells Moses to turn around and Moses sees Akiva’s flesh being weighed in the marketplace. He turns to God and cries, “This is his Torah and this is his reward?!?” to which God replies the same phrase, “Be silent, this is according to My plan.”
Moses doesn’t get it. He’s still set in the paradigm of working and then receiving a subsequent reward, which frames the theology of the Book of Deuteronomy from the Five Books of… well, you know…! To Moses, the reward, the thing that comforts, comes after the task. Moses expects reward after the labor, because he doesn’t realize the sacred task is the reward. Our reward, our comfort, is knowing that we can step outside… that society needs us to step outside of its own paradigm to gently critique it and improve it. That’s what it means to be or lagoyim – “a light unto the nations” – to follow our sacred task by not getting too comfortable in society’s paradigms and instead gently critiquing and improving them for all. We are the Hebrews, the Ivrim, the people who transcend society’s paradigms, the people who stand outside and often get vilified for it but do so nonetheless. We step outside not despite it being uncomfortable but because it is uncomfortable. We question our society’s paradigms not because we are exceptional but because we believe there can be more – it is our stepping outside that is exceptional, not us ourselves. And in Judaism we do it in a particular way – not by shutting ourselves off in a cave but by repenting, by atoning, which means by questioning ourselves and questioning our society that shapes us.
This is why despair is not a Jewish thing. If you look at the state of the world and despair, you’re still locked into a paradigm of hope being connected to the promise of a better future. In Judaism, though, we look at the state of the world, of our society, and we roll up our sleeves in an act of hope. So long as we have the power to improve the world, we cannot despair. So, that leads us to one final question for this season – When I look at the world around me, what am I going to change? When I look at the world around me, what am I going to change? That could be something that we change about the world, that could be something that we change about ourselves, or it could be both. For our teshuvah to be effective, meaningful, real today, there has to be an answer to that question. It’s an uncomfortable question, and thank God for that discomfort.
So, may we all experience the discomfort that comes before teshuvah. May we on this Yom Kippur embrace the discomfort that leads us to action, to change, to improving ourselves and the world. May we never give in to despair but instead create hope by envisioning and creating newer, healthier paradigms for everyone. May we be divergent in our thinking and being not to be contrary or to feed our egos but to illuminate a new way of being for all as our Divine mission. And in this year of 5785, may we support our sacred community so that we may support each other in this, the most essential sacred task, and let us say, Amen.