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In 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel gave a speech in Chicago called “Race and Religion” at a national conference of the same name. He opened his speech by remarking that the very first conference on race and religion, long before the Civil Rights Movement, was between none other than Moses and Pharaoh. Rabbi Heschel’s words resonated with much of the audience, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom Heschel would become friends and allies over the course of the Civil Rights Movement.

In “Race and Religion,” Rabbi Heschel quotes from the beginning of the Book of Exodus, the beginning of the Israelite journey from bondage to freedom. As Moses declared to Pharoah, “Thus says Adonai, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness.” Pharaoh responds, “Who is Adonai that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know Adonai, nor will I let Israel go” (Exodus 5:1-2). Rabbi Heschel goes on to say that the conference between Moses and Pharaoh remains unresolved. “The exodus began, but is far from being completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a (Black person) to cross certain university campuses.” 57 years later, the exodus is still incomplete.

Our consciousness of racism in this country was heightened after George Floyd was killed by a police officer last May in Minneapolis. As time has passed, however, and our news cycles and social media feeds have moved on, the plague of systemic racism has remained. Last week, the District Attorney of Kenosha, Wisconsin, decided not to charge the officers involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times in the back on August 23 and left partly paralyzed. Another Black victim of police violence is left without justice. The Kenosha District Attorney announced this during the same week Black organizers in Georgia, led by Stacey Abrams, helped elect the first Black senator of Georgia, Rev. Raphael Warnock of Dr. King’s former church Ebenezer Baptist. It was also the same week mostly white rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol with minimal responses from law enforcement. Through these events, we can see that even as progress is made, there is still so far to go.

As Rabbi Andy taught us last week, however, we can still do our part even though we have a long road ahead of us. One of Rabbi Heschel’s solutions to racism in our country is to cultivate the prophetic voice in each of us. The tradition of the prophecy begins in the Hebrew Bible, where the prophet acts as the intermediary between God and humanity, advocating on behalf of the marginalized and speaking truth to the power of Ancient Israel’s kings. Rabbi Heschel brings the role of the prophet to our moral consciousness, writing that the prophet is intolerant to injustice, wrongdoing, and indifference. Further, Rabbi Heschel urges us to develop a grain of the prophet, morally affected by injustice, in all of us. The exodus narrative provides an example for how we can all be a little bit of a prophet with the origin story of the greatest prophet of our tradition, Moses. Moses shows the power of action when he can’t stand by an Egyptian taskmaster beating an Israelite slave (Exodus 2:11-12), the importance of humility in leadership when he encounters God in the burning bush (Exodus 3:11-12), and the impact of working collectively when he taps his brother Aaron as his spokesperson (Exodus 4:28-30). Through Moses’s example and Rabbi Heschel’s words, it is within our power to follow in the footsteps of our prophetic tradition and work for justice.

The first conference on race and religion between Moses and Pharaoh found in the Book of Exodus, Rabbi Heschel’s 1963 speech, the momentum of the anti-racist movement in 2020, and the lack of charges in the Jacob Blake shooting are all reminders that our exodus is still incomplete. However, there is no better time to respond to this moral urgency than right now. Rabbi Deena leads an anti-racist book group that meets monthly and there is always room for more participants. We are seeing new displays of Black-Jewish alliances as the two new U.S. Senators of Georgia are Black and Jewish, as are the new leaders of the Senate, Vice President Elect Kamala Harris and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Reverend Raphael Warnock even said that he thinks Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dr. King are smiling somewhere knowing that he and Jon Ossoff were just elected to the U.S. Senate in Georgia. This Shabbat, just a few days before Dr. Martin Luther King Day, I hope we can still hear Rabbi Heschel’s call for racial justice through Moses and Pharaoh’s conference, and renew our efforts to complete the exodus with dignity and justice for all of humanity.

When I was a boy, my father would often take me to the movies at a Milwaukee landmark called the Oriental Theater, which would play classics and from time to time stage rock shows. It’s where we saw Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane; every Marx Brothers film and old reruns of Sid Caeser’s Show of Shows; Black Orpheus, the films of Truffaut, Renoir, and of course, everything made by Mel Brooks. As a teenager I saw Devo and the Talking Heads there and once even rescued a friend from a date gone wrong at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Oriental Theater, we might say, was an institution that had an idea of itself. It knew who it was, who it wanted to be, and, was confident that in its commitment to art, others could eventually find themselves as well.

Like many fathers of his generation, my dad would never leave the theater until the lights went up because the rolling credits were like a walk of Jewish pride. Writers, directors, producers, actors, camera operators, gaffes, you name it — names and positions would roll by and my dad would point out the Jews. His pride was a given: he didn’t have to name it. Son of a refugee; veteran of the Second World War; a college degree thanks to the GI Bill; he was grateful for all America had given him and he was damn sure going to celebrate the achievements of other Jews as well. In other words, like the movie theater’s credo, artists were at the front lines of an innate human mandate to be oneself. To join the unique one to the whole to make a greater whole. Like that great American phrase, “from many, one.”

With the inevitable independence of young adulthood, having experienced a less sanguine view of American patriotism growing up amidst the wrenching debates and violence of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, US military involvement with dictatorships in Central and South America and an escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union, I was more mixed about serving our country when President Reagan required registration for the Selective Service of those students eligible for student loans. My friend Allen and I — both opposed to registration — sat across from our dads one afternoon and debated the merits of our views. Both men had fought for America to defeat fascism and were not particularly interested in our view of just and unjust wars. They felt, plain and simple, that national service was a duty of all Americans and that if we opposed where we were being sent, we had ways of communicating, talking to others about it, but nothing would replace the overriding obligation to serve.

The dads won the debate. We registered. In protest, I suppose, but signed up we did though there never was a draft. Perhaps Reagan was playing to a voting bloc, perhaps he was genuinely convinced of the merits of readiness during a Cold War that showed few signs of ending. We’ll have to go back to the archives for that.

But the concession to civic obligation despite objection is a lesson I have carried with me throughout a lifetime of service, albeit Jewish service, since our nation in fact asks very little of us. We require nothing of our youth when they turn eighteen; we don’t like to pay taxes; our infrastructure is in disrepair; the gap between rich and poor is unconscionably wide; and still, more than four hundred years since slavery was introduced to North America, we have yet to adequately address the great injustice that lies at the center of the American project.

No requirement of duty beyond the self? Come on: there is so much work to do. I refuse to believe that self-service is a runaway train and that we are witnessing the end of America as we once knew it. Rather, I take the view, especially in light of violent, racist and anti-Semitic mob attacks in the nation’s Capitol this past week, that we are finally seeing a long overdue reckoning for a new spirit and a new patriotism to begin to emerge. We are not there yet; not even close.

But if you’re like me and you listen to the voices of young people, behold their diversity, their openness to questions of race, gender, class and identity, you can’t help but think that the toxic mob of hate that polluted Washington this past week is in fact a cancerous burst of exhaust sputtering from the beat-up jalopy of a nation that is transforming itself before our very eyes.

Watching in horror while neo-Nazis and white supremacists desecrate the corridors of democracy this week might have you thinking otherwise but don’t take the bait. Don’t give in to despair. Don’t believe everything you see. You must play the long game. Or, as they say in the Black civil rights movement over and over and over again: Keep your eyes on the prize. Wade in the water. The arc of history is long and it bends toward justice.

For all of us suffused in the often fetid pools of social media and the immediacy of communication, feral neurological gratification from seeing a chat or tweet or tik-tok click-clack its way into your soul, remember this: principles like Freedom, Justice, Equality and Liberty are won not in an instant; nor in a lifetime; but in several lifetimes, in an accumulation of efforts over generations of time. Ours is to play the part in our time. Or as Woody Guthrie once said, “Whose side are you on?”

You can probably guess how I feel about the degrading narcissism of our nation’s president enabling and encouraging the violence and malignancy of American bigots. You can probably guess how I feel about the countless others who enabled him for their own reasons, their own agendas, these last many years. And I, as an American and as a Jew, with a conscience shaped by the kilns of history and human suffering, not only refuse to give in but am in fact energized, even more now, to win the day not just for myself but for all Americans, believers and non-believers, from every imaginable race and gender and economic station in life. Why? Because Freedom and Justice and Equality are all expressions of the particularity of what God has designed for us as it is written in our holiest books and because being free and equal among those with whom we share community, wherever that community is, seems like a pretty damn good way to live.

True story. In 1969, before Bud Selig brought the Brewers to Milwaukee, the Chicago White Sox used to play games at County Stadium. My dad and uncle took me and my cousin Mike to see a game on a warm summer night. Some raucous fans were pounding beers in front of us and my dad said to them, “Hey, could you keep it down?” One miscreant said, “Shut up, kike.” And without a moment’s notice, my Uncle Bill, who had been a Big Ten champion boxer at UW-Madison in the fifties, punched the guy’s lights out with one blow.

He deserved it. We left. And in the parking lot on the way to our car, I asked my dad, “What’s a kike?” His answer has stayed with me like every lesson he gave me: “It’s a Jew, son, in the mouths of people who hate us.”

If you’re like me, you wanted to throw some punches this week, too.

*****

“A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground” (Exodus 8-10).

Sound familiar? It should. It is the root text of anti-Semitism. It is the view that the Jew is an outsider, not able to be trusted, disloyal, conniving, abundant. It is also the playbook that American racists from Father Coughlin to Strom Thurmond to George Wallace to Donald Trump have deployed. The Exodus story, which in its fundamental composition is the story of a minority people, consigned to the status of “other,” is singled out, oppressed, persecuted and enslaved so that the “true nation” may thrive. Arguably, we Jews have experienced this on a scale unlike any nation on earth. Yet, with our Torah’s commandment that each of us is made in the “divine image” and that we are to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” there is also an undeniable universalism to our particular message of what God expects of us.

We are inextricably bound to one another; each of us are children of God; or, as the coin of the realm proudly proclaims, “e pluribus unum — from many, one.”

Do you find me rambling? I may be. After all, I am as heartbroken and shocked and angry as you are right now. But as your rabbi, it is my obligation to offer you words of hope, perspective, and comfort, in the face of one of the ugliest displays of hatred and violence wrought by an American president in the history of our nation.

Will there be justice in the weeks and months ahead? I hope so. Will a new administration encourage cooperation, openness, patience and understanding in the weeks and months ahead? I hope so. Will the ever-changing face of America continue to grow and evolve, yielding new definitions, new possibilities, and a new way forward for all Americans? I won’t quit until it is so. And neither should you.

*****

Two images hang above my dresser. I look at them each day as I prepare to face the world.

One is a cross-stitch made by my mother in 1964 when I was a year old. John F. Kennedy had been killed; President LBJ had deepened American involvement in Vietnam; after the shedding of much blood, after the deaths of too many for the right to vote, including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which banned segregation in public places. Aquaint piece of Americana says, “My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of theeI sing.” Of course, my mother meant this all quite sincerely. She was hardly nodding to George and Ira Gershwin, George S. Kauffman and Morrie Ryskind’s satirical American musical about politics in the 1920s and 1930s but there is a connection here.

Because we Jews, as we always have, embrace our patriotism and critique it; we are proud and ashamed; we know what we know but want to always know more, do more, and in doing so create a better iteration of the American project on America. What did Rabbi Tarfon say? “You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

I can get behind that. Can you?

The other image is a photograph of Rabbi Joachim Prinz and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walking together at the 1963 March on Washington. Rabbi Prinz, a Berlin refugee from Nazi Germany who would speak at the rally; and Rev. Dr. King, who would soon be martyred for his Biblically mandated insistence that equality is a divine right.

That day in Washington, between the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and Reverend King, Rabbi Prinz said:

“America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.

Our children, yours and mine in every school across the land, each morning pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands. They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of ‘liberty and justice for all.’

The time, I believe, has come to work together — for it is not enough to hope together, and it is not enough to pray together, to work together that this children’s oath, pronounced every morning from Maine to California, from North to South, may become a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.”

Moments later, as he concluded his iconic and monumental “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King said:

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning,

‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

‘Free at last! free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

Our Torah portion this week begins with slavery. But we know that it ends with freedom. And our week this week began with an abhorrent desecration of our nation’s most revered institution; but we must have faith in its restoration, its potential for integrity; and its facility as a tool for liberty and justice for all.

Keep the faith, friends. Fight the fight. Love thy neighbor as thyself. These are challenging times but we have seen darker ones. We will make it through with faith, hope, hard, hard work, and love.

We begin this new year by completing the Book of Genesis, the first of the five books in the Torah. And like most endings, this one is filled with reflection, nostalgia, and sweetness.

It is at this point in the Torah, Parashat Vayechi, that we leave behind the story of the first Jewish family. For much of the book of Genesis, we have focused on the very first Jews, Abraham and Sarah, and the four generations that follow. The Torah has taken us through the drama of this family: its births and deaths, its joys and triumphs, its betrayals, rivalries, and heartbreaks.

In this week’s Torah portion, we encounter Jacob and his sons in Egypt, having found refuge there during a famine in the land of Israel. Knowing that he is close to death, Jacob calls his sons, one by one, to give them each a special and honest blessing. He recognizes their unique strengths and faults, and shares with them his final pieces of advice. His blessing to his grandsons, Ephraim and Menassheh, has been turned into one of the most treasured Jewish lullabies:

“Ha’malach ha’goel oti mi’kol ra, yevarech et ha’ne’arim v’yikra vahem sh’mi, v’shem Avotai, Avraham v’Yitzhak. V’yidgu la’rov b’kerev ha’aretz… The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm — Bless these children. In them may my name be recalled, And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac. And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth” (Genesis 48:16).

He also shares his final wish: to be buried in the land of Israel, at the Cave of Machpelah, next to his wife Leah; his parents, Isaac and Rebekkah; and his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah. He wants to be close to his roots.

Cave of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron

Jacob seems to know that the spotlight of history will soon leave his family and will instead be cast upon the Israelites as a collective: their enslavement in Egypt, struggle for freedom, journey toward the land of Israel, and covenant with God. Indeed, Jacob claims that his twelve sons will no longer be understood as individuals, but as leaders of the twelve tribes into which the Israelites will be divided. The next chapter will be bigger than the story of this individual family.

Jacob ushers his sons, and the Jewish people, into a new stage of their existence. It will be a grand future, filled with national challenges, joys, and miracles.

Though we have a tough winter ahead, we are on the precipice of great hope: a vaccine in sight, the possibility of a return to our communities, the anticipation of hugging our loved ones again. As we transition into this new year, I can’t help but imagine us all as Jacob, ushering in a new era of history, blessing and guiding our families with courage as we face all that lies ahead.

May you have a New Year filled with blessings, and, as always, a Shabbat filled with peace.

If the Torah is like a crown to the Jewish people, then the Joseph story, which occupies a hallowed place in the narrative of Genesis, is the Torah’s crown jewel. The story is brilliantly told; dramatically rendered in complex detail; and in many regards, represents the apotheosis of the Book of Genesis’ revolt against primogeniture.

Birth order and sibling rivalry is one of the through-lines of Genesis. Cain slays Abel; Ishmael makes sport of Isaac; Esau sells his birthright to Jacob. Then there is Joseph, who wears the pride and self-satisfaction of his coat-of-many-colors and provokes the murderous rage of his brothers, is sold into slavery, rises to power in Egypt and in this week’s parshah, Va-Yigash, effectuates a healing reconciliation with his siblings and brings to an end self-inflicted family pain of sibling rivalry. In the face of this ancient tradition which permeated Near Eastern culture at the time, ancient Judaism’s inherent iconoclasm posited a different worldview: that wit, intelligence and dogged persistence toward a goal ought to be the driver of Jewish continuity.

Upending primogeniture is not Judaism’s only iconoclasm. The Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna, in his important book Understanding Genesis, shows how concise word usage in the creation myth alluded to other Mesopotamian gods being supplanted through literary devices by the one God, Creator of the Universe. Paganistic polytheism as represented by Tiamat, Goddess of the Sea, is brought to her knees in one sweep of the Divine spirit hovering over the waters of the deep. Or consider when Abraham is called by God to “go forth” from his “land, birthplace, and father’s house” to a land God will show him, the Midrash brings to bear the story of Abraham smashing his father’s clay idols. This prompts the rabbis to suggest that the reason God chose Abraham on this special mission was because he was an idol-smasher from his youth. A breaker of rules.

It is in this context that we understand the brilliance of Joseph’s story. Because after all the machinations required to get Joseph to Egypt, to witnessing his rise to power, to the trickery he himself deploys to teach his brothers a lesson, and then the great reveal of his identity to them and the sense of family reconciliation, we experience the Torah closing this chapter of history. Here, privilege of birth-status is no longer the supreme value in a family and leadership is determined not by the color of one’s coat, to quote a phrase, but by the content of one’s character.

The family unites in Egypt to be sure; but as we know, rather ominously, a new pharaoh will arise in Egypt who “knows not Joseph” and the calamity of slavery will fall upon the nation of the Jews. It will be four hundred years of suffering before we are freed in the Exodus. The rabbis in the Midrash teach us, rather pointedly, that it was because of sibling rivalry that we were once slaves in Egypt. It’s how we got there. A moral reckoning for future generations.

“On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone forth from Egypt,” the Torah teaches in Exodus 19, the Jewish people journeyed in the Sinai desert. There, near Mount Sinai, moments before the Torah was given, God said, “Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the children of Israel.”

A kingdom of priests. A holy nation. Read through the lens of the Genesis narrative, this is not triumphal chauvinism; rather, it is a radical re-writing of the social order. It is Jewish civilization positing that what makes a kingdom is the righteous behavior of leaders, who in turn inspire the entire nation to holiness and deeds of lovingkindness. Judaism’s call for exceptionalism, for making real the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and to “care for the widow and orphan and stranger in our midst,” and to “seek peace, pursue it” are the covenanted responsibility of us all.

Whether we are turning the pages of Torah, or the year 2020, let us renew our days by choosing life and blessing, each of us as responsible as the other in a nation of many that in fact is fundamentally, one.

Never before have I studied the Torah as a blueprint for an efficient and effective crisis management plan.

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Miketz, the Egyptian Pharaoh (not the one who enslaved the Israelites… we’ll meet him in a few weeks) learns of, plans for, and responds — brilliantly — to an international emergency.

As the parasha opens, Pharaoh has two bizarre dreams. In the first, seven scrawny, weak cows swallow seven plump, healthy ones. In the second, seven thin, scraggly ears of wheat swallow seven hearty, sturdy ones. Pharaoh, troubled by these dreams and unsure of their meaning, summons a reliable dream interpreter: Joseph, the Israelite, who has been languishing in an Egyptian prison for a crime he did not commit. Joseph quickly gets a haircut and a fresh change of clothes, and is brought before the Pharaoh. He explains that these dreams are one and the same:

Immediately ahead are seven years of great abundance in all the land of Egypt. After them will come seven years of famine, and all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. As the land is ravaged by famine, no trace of the abundance will be left in the land because of the famine thereafter, for it will be very severe. As for Pharaoh having had the same dream twice, it means that the matter has been determined by God, and that God will soon carry it out” (Genesis 42:29-32).

Joseph suggests that Pharaoh appoint an official who will use the seven abundant years to prepare for the seven years of famine. Pharaoh doesn’t think twice: he hands Joseph his signet ring and appoints him ruler of Egypt. 

In those first seven years, Joseph centralizes the Egyptian economy. He creates reserves of grain in each city, and saves up so much that, by the end of the seven years, it is impossible to measure just how much grain he has accumulated. And, as predicted, when the seven years of plenty end, all the nations of the earth suffer through the famine…except, of course, for Egypt. The Egyptian people live in comfort, and sell their surplus grain to the rest of the world, all thanks to Joseph’s incredible powers of prediction and planning.

Living through COVID-19, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m actually a little envious of how well his plan played out. It seems perfect: Pharaoh learns of an impending crisis, immediately appoints a capable bureaucrat, and plans for the future. The Egyptians don’t popularize conspiracy theories, they don’t protest the collection of grain; they come together as a nation to do what needs to be done. And in the end, they benefit greatly, enjoying prosperity and plenty in a time of scarcity.

Of course, we lack a resource to which Joseph and the Egyptians had access: the power to predict the future ensured by an invisible, but omnipotent and ever-present God. Unlike in the biblical narrative, God never shared the fact that a global pandemic was on its way. God didn’t tell anyone how severe it would be, how long it would last, or just how drastically it would alter human life. If God did speak to any contemporary earthling to share these plans, we’d probably be right to have our doubts, to say the least.

Unlike our leaders today, Joseph knew with great certainty that he was making the right choices; if he weren’t, God would have steered him in a different direction. A guarantee from God that everything will turn out well in the end no doubt makes it easier to be a leader.

Ultimately, Joseph’s role was pretty straightforward: follow God’s plans, and everything will be just fine. We, who lack direct access to God and who don’t know the outcomes of our decisions, have it tougher. We face tremendous uncertainty each day: Which activities are safe and which are not? When will life return to normal? What will “back to normal” even mean?

To me, the most important thing we can do is aspire to have the faith of Pharaoh. Pharaoh himself did not speak directly with God. But he was able to trust Joseph’s dreams (which were, back then, the most reliable source of information); to appoint a capable leader (and give him a second chance by looking over the fact that he had spent time in prison); and to hope — and act — for the best.

May we, and our leaders, all borrow that ancient faith.

Hanukkah could not come at a better time each year. As winter sets in and days grow shorter, darkness descends. Moods are affected and we hunker down for the long haul. But one of the remarkable things about the timing of this unique festival on the Jewish calendar is that Hanukkah occurs just at the nadir of darkness and we respond, indeed are obligated to respond, with light. The sages of the tradition are even said to have debated how one should light the menorah: should the festival begin with all eight lights and then diminish as the days unfold; or should we start with one, and day by day, increase the light emanating warmth, brilliancy and the resiliency of Jewish history for our surrounding community to see?

We know who won that debate: Jewish Hope. The sense that no matter how challenging a time may be in our history, we are a people duty-bound to optimism, to better days, one day at a time; to hope.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of a hate-filled terrorist attack in Jersey City, where three people were killed at a kosher grocery store. At the time of the attack and Thursday on its anniversary, citizens gathered to remember three beautiful souls lost in the atrocity, each from different walks of life, different faiths, different backgrounds, and pledged again to banish hate with love, to drive out darkness with light. Said Jersey City councilwoman Joyce Watterman, “We would not allow fear or division to grip our hearts. We found our strength in one another.”

Gun violence, hate crimes with assault-rifles and high powered magazines are their own pandemic. And as we continue to embrace the unifying ideas of mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing, we await a vaccine that will hopefully remove this pandemic from our midst. And mourning those lost to this terrible virus, we will gather ourselves, find “our strength in one another,” and continue to battle against forces of hate, division, racism and intolerance to difference. This is our duty as Jews.

We learned it the hard way, the sages also taught us. And in this week’s Torah portion, we get a glimpse into one of the most significant inflection points of hatred and violence that tears a family apart in the present while leaving future generations to ponder the lessons and draw new conclusions, healing lessons, in order to plant seeds of hope and prosperity rather than rancor and destruction.

In this week’s parsha, Vayeshev (Genesis 37:1-40:23) we encounter the patriarch Jacob among his children and because of Jacob’s special love and bestowal of a coveted jacket for his young son Joseph, the brothers conspire to kill their brother. His audacious personality, his self-aggrandizing dreams, his status as favored son, enrages them. Of course, sibling rivalry is not new to the Biblical Genesis. In fact, one might argue, it is a necessary through-line, an object lesson in what life can really be like. Rivalry and jealousy are to a large extent exposing and, at times, embarrassing mirror images of ourselves, reflecting our worst selves so that, with hope, we might see us as others do, change our ways and grow into better people.

Judaism is funny that way, isn’t it? We don’t populate our epic stories with saints and role models whose virtues are impossible to emulate. Rather, we embrace the messiness of it all, expose their flaws just as our own are plain for all to see, and through the interpretive process of “turning words of Torah over and over because everything is in it” refine our hearts and souls and model that duty to refinement for the next generation.

The tradition begins with narrative rivalry in the first family. Cain is jealous of his brother Abel’s favored offering to God and in his anger, murders him. Ishmael toys with his younger brother Isaac and is banished with his mother Hagar. Jacob is born immediately on the heel of his brother Esau, gripping him by the foot on their way out of the womb, foreshadowing a competition among the brothers for the right to be called firstborn and to merit their father Isaac’s most sacred blessing.

The fighting, the wiliness, the jealousies, the caginess of it all. What a mess! But what a brilliantly realistic mess it is, engaging us in its realism, its close-to-the-bone depiction of what it means to be a person. Saints are wonderful human beings and sinners got their work cut out for them; still, who would you rather talk to at a party? Some years ago I met an older gentleman in an artists’ loft who was a child stagehand to vaudeville and in his later years, a stained glass worker. As a gift, he gave me a piece called “Saint and Sinner,” and it depicted a kind of generic, angelic looking youth alongside a leering, cigar chomping, eyebrow raising Groucho Marx. I used to marvel at how quickly my eyes focused on Groucho. I don’t know about you, but at a party, I’m talking to Groucho everytime.

The biblical scholar and literary critic Robert Alter describes the Joseph story in Genesis as its own novel. Its ear for language, narrative detail, and dramatic twists and turns, depict Jacob’s family in colorful, outrageous and at times very unflattering light. But the drama draws us deeper into the story, a many-sided mirror as efflorescent as the technicolor dreamcoat the brothers all want, and we see a Jewish family that may be all too familiar to us. And that is precisely the point. It’s no wonder so many Jews turn out to be lawyers and therapists. There is something about close examination, dissecting words and parsing meaning, and seeking the depth of understanding and reconciliation to life’s endless challenges that we all deserve.

The Talmud has a particularly timely and necessary corrective to the Joseph story. The sages teach that the reason Israel was enslaved in Egypt is because of sibling rivalry. While it is true that the forces of history have often conspired against us; that our fate has often been in the hands of leaders who determine the trajectory of our lives; it is also undeniable that had the brothers not hated Joseph, had their jealousy and rivalry been so acutely tuned, they never would have conspired to kill him; they never would have sold him into slavery; they never would have gone down to Egypt themselves fleeing famine; and they never would have all been together when “a new pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph” and enslaved an entire nation.

Our fate can sometimes turn on a dime, it is true. And our fate is also in our hands. Both can be true. And perhaps the lesson here is that we need to see both to be true in order to embrace and absorb the lessons of life that understand life’s fragility alongside our own agency in bringing hope, love, reconciliation and justice to our communities and the world at large.

As we light our Hanukkah candles tonight and on through all eight days, let’s increase the light, warmth and love in our world. Let’s be messy prophets of hope.

Chag Sameach. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge. One time recently, however, I was awed by the view of downtown Manhattan as I biked in from Brooklyn. Buildings in the distance glistened under a bright blue sky, with the Statue of Liberty to my left and the Manhattan Bridge to my right, as I pedaled up the bridge from the density of Downtown Brooklyn into what felt like an endless expanse over the East River. After countless times back and forth on the Brooklyn Bridge by car, and a few by foot, I saw this view in a new light from my bicycle as I encountered this extraordinary feeling of expansiveness.

Last week, Rabbi Deena taught us about the patriarch Jacob’s magical experience connecting to God in his sleep. Right after he wakes up from his dream, Jacob says, “God was in this place and I didn’t know it!” (Genesis 28:16). We can see in this short exclamation that there can be an element of spirituality, even Godliness, in our experiences existing just beneath the surface. For the patriarch Jacob, that meant that God had been present where he stopped for the night totally unbeknownst to him. For this Jacob, it meant that a soul-stirring view was present on the Brooklyn Bridge every time I had traveled between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and not only when I took note of it.

Now in this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, Jacob has another experience that at its surface could be as ordinary as a night’s sleep or a commute. On his way to reunite with his brother Esau, Jacob encounters a mysterious character. “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the rise of dawn” (Genesis 32:25). There isn’t anything particularly spiritual about this encounter at face value. Later verses and texts, however, show that this wasn’t just any man. Jacob realizes sooner this time around that he was in the presence of a divine being (Genesis 32:31). The prophet Hosea confirms that Jacob “strove with a divine being; he strove with an angel and prevailed” (Hosea 12:5). Midrash claims that the man was Esau’s guardian angel and biblical commentators generally agree that while the word itself means “man,” it was an angel who had assumed the form of a human being (Genesis Rabbah 77:3). Through this encounter, we see the same lesson that Jacob portrayed last week when he realized “God was in this place,” that spiritual connections can exist in our midst without realizing it.

The Jewish tradition of waiting for the Messiah provides another example of divinity beneath the surface. There is a story in the Talmud where Elijah the Prophet (Eliyahu Ha-Navi) says that the “Messiah is at the gates of Rome, sitting among the poor, the sick, and the wretched” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98a). Performance artist and playwright Deb Margolin expands this idea by saying, “(The Messiah) could be anybody. You don’t know, so it’s best to be gracious to everyone” (Moment Magazine, 2012). Even the Messiah could seem like a normal person at face value, and hold immeasurable spiritual value beyond what our eyes can see. It can be Beth-El, where Jacob encountered God in his sleep, the banks of the Jabbok river where Jacob wrestled with an angel, the gates of Rome, Brooklyn Bridge, or really anywhere else; our tradition exhibits that each seemingly ordinary moment is filled with spiritual possibility. I hope this Shabbat uncovers glimpses of those moments for all of us.

Please join myself, Rabbi Deena Gottlieb, and Hebrew School Project Director Erin Beser tonight at 6 pm for a family-friendly, musical Shabbat service on Zoom (Meeting ID: 893 4555 7892; Password: JCP). All are welcome to attend, and we also hope to see you next week, to celebrate Hanukkah!

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” These words were spoken by the artist Vincent van Gogh. If you know his most famous work, Starry Night, this sentiment makes sense. In this painting, he captures the enchantment, the wonder, and the mystery that he senses in the night sky.

In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical, The Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom describes his fascination with the night: “Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation. Darkness wakes and stirs imagination. Silently, the senses abandon their defenses, helpless to resist the notes I write.”

There’s something captivating and compelling about the nighttime, the hours when our rational and reasonable selves are quieted for the day, and our imaginations are active and alert.
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei, the patriarch Jacob has a magical experience in the middle of the night. When the parasha opens, we find Jacob on the run, trying to escape the wrath of his brother, Esau, whom he has just betrayed. On this first night, Jacob finds a “certain place” (later identified by the Rabbis as Jerusalem), puts a stone under his head to serve as a pillow, and nods off. While he sleeps, he dreams of a ladder whose bottom rungs are firmly planted on the ground, but whose top reaches up to the sky. Ascending and descending the ladder are angels of God.

Amidst this otherworldly vision, God appears to him and says: “I am Adonai, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac….Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (Genesis 28:13-15).

Jacob awakes suddenly, startled and excited, and proclaims: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven!” (Genesis 28:17). He is overwhelmed and thrilled by his close encounter with the divine. But the music of the night can’t last forever. The magic of Jacob’s nighttime revelation quickly dissolves into the skepticism that daylight reliably brings. In the morning, Jacob becomes suspicious of his mystical experience from the previous night. Instead of trusting that God’s revelation will come true, he begins to bargain with God: “If God remains with me, if God protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house—then Adonai shall be my God” (Genesis 28:20-21).

It’s hard to blame Jacob for his incredulity. What if he had only imagined God’s appearance, and God’s promises? After all, we know that dreams don’t always come true, no matter how real and believable they may seem in the protective cocoon of the night.

Although this year’s celebration likely felt more tempered than usual, yesterday’s Thanksgiving holiday was an opportunity to focus on the gifts and blessings of our lives. Perhaps you Zoomed with your relatives, or ate a leisurely meal, or enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that almost all Americans paused for a day to reflect on and share our gratitude. The sheer scale of Thanksgiving, with so many people from different backgrounds, faiths, and experiences partaking in the same common rituals, can sometimes feel like a dream.

But today is the day after Thanksgiving, a day when we transition back to reality. The mindset of abundance—both for the tangible and intangible bounty in our lives—that we embrace on Thanksgiving can easily give way to feelings of lack and insufficiency. It doesn’t help that today is the biggest shopping day of the year, on which many of us understandably feel the need to acquire, purchase, and amass more stuff before we can feel at peace. The transition from satisfaction to scarcity is instantaneous, as though we have suddenly woken up from a dream that we dare not trust.

What if Jacob had held on to the magic of his nighttime vision, where he felt sure of the completeness and totality of God’s protective presence? What if, as the sun rose, he could have quelled his desire to allow doubt, disbelief, and apprehension to overtake him, even if only for a few moments? How much more rich that day might have been.

What if we, too, could trust our gratitude instead of questioning it? What if we could hold on to the feeling of shlemut, of wholeness and abundance, that Thanksgiving offers us, even for a few extra moments? How different might our lives be if we lingered in the dreamland of gratitude, instead of waking up immediately to the reality of consumerism and constant acquisition?

This Shabbat, may we all have the opportunity to sleep a little longer, so we may live in and trust the beauty of our dreams.

Rivalry and strife are baked into the human project aren’t they? It seems an inherent part of the dynamic of what it means to be alive. In the telling of our Jewish tradition in the Torah narrative, it is there from the beginning. The tensions are present from the start: sky above and the earth below; a Divine spirit hovering over the face of the deep; good and evil; man and woman. All around us is difference and the capacity to name and organize those differences according to the power we have as thinking, reasoning, sentient beings.

According to the Torah, God makes the male and female human in the “Divine Image” and places them in the Garden of Eden and warns them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yeah, right. Who would listen to that? Half of the fun of living is the adventure of walking that thin line, too often blurred by those who lack distinction. The choices we make are only expressions of free will if we have the choice ourselves to decide. So obviously God wanted the first humans to eat from that tree in order to embed within them the power to choose.

Human history, tragically, is littered with the bodies and the destruction wrought by poor choices, by evil doings. According to the midrash to Genesis, God built many worlds before the one we currently live in and finally gave up on the idea of perfection. Instead, the rabbis say, God created repentance and the ability to change one’s path, to do good, and to choose life. This is, to a significant degree, what we mean when we say that Judaism is a religious tradition that privileges both realism and hope. To be realistic and hopeful is to hold potentially two conflicting views of the world together at once. Or, in the words of Mel Brooks, “Hope for the best, expect the worst. Life is a play, unrehearsed.”

If God realized early on that perfection is the enemy of the good, there is a lesson there for us all. And read through a certain lens, we might say that the Torah’s first book, Genesis, makes this abundantly clear when it comes to the human project. It is filled with the kinds of twists and turns, aspiring, soaring deeds of goodness mucked up by incomprehensible acts of cruelty and evil. It’s a messy story, and in no particular family dynamic is that messiness made more apparent than in the variety of depictions of sibling rivalries.

Cain and Abel fight over whose offering is most beloved by God and Cain rises up to kill his brother. Ishmael makes sport of his younger brother Isaac which enrages Isaac’s mother Sarah, who demands that Ishmael and his mother Hagar are expelled into the wilderness. And in this week’s Torah portion, Toldot, Rebecca feels great pain in her womb during pregnancy and inquires of God, asking “Why do I even exist?!” She then receives a prophecy that says, “Two nations are in your womb, two separate people shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other; and the older shall serve the younger.”

When the two boys emerged at birth, Esau came first, with his brother Jacob gripping his angle on the way out. The curtain rose on the unrehearsed play of these brothers’ lives, an ancient literary narrative that is among the most colorful, profound, emotional and confounding of any in Jewish literature.

Rashi teaches us an interesting set of legends. In one he says that the struggle already in the womb was about the two infants representing radically different world views. Whenever Rebecca walked past a House of Study, the baby Jacob would struggle to get out to go learn Torah; and whenever Rebecca walked past a pagan altar, Esau would struggle to go make a sacrifice to false Gods. We might say Rashi is arguing that inherent to the human project is the unavoidable tension between an unseeable God who demands observance of the law and deeds of loving-kindness, and an idolatrous, atavistic being which represents false worship. Picture Abraham smashing his father’s idols; Moses demanding that no human should rule over and oppress another human. It is the stark either/or of early Jewish theology.

In another midrash which Rashi brings to bear, he says that actually the brothers were arguing in the womb, about who would inherit this world and who would inherit the world to come. Here we might say that the rabbinic tradition is shedding light on the ways in which different faiths seek dominion over the other. Judaism begins and goes from Abraham to Moses; Christianity supplants Judaism with Jesus; Islam privileges Mohammed as the next iteration of God’s revealed truth to the world. Only one of us can be right. That type of thing.

And that’s just in the womb!

But what is the womb other than a beginning; of darkness over deep waters and the hovering spirit of the Divine animating the souls of those within as they emerge in to the messiness of life, with all its imperfections, challenges, mistakes, and disappointments, triumphs and pure joy?

And what is life other than a series of tests, questions and experiments in living, an “unrehearsed play” in which only we, with enough luck and good fortune, can determine the end?

Throughout this week’s Torah portion and in the coming weeks we will see the rivalry between Jacob and Esau endure many twists and turns; and in Joseph’s narrative that follows, we will see that rivalry explode into the kind of technicolor rendering that makes it, to paraphrase Robert Alter, practically a separate novella within the Hebrew Bible.

Did Isaac and Ishmael ever reconcile? Did Jacob and Esau? Did Joseph and his brothers? Do we in our own families, communities, nations?

The sages taught long ago that the real cause of the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt was not the evil devisings of Pharaoh or the harsh cruelties of the Egyptian taskmasters. Rather, they say that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt because of sibling rivalry. Had the brothers not been jealous of Joseph, they would not have stolen him away and faked his death; he never would have been sold into service in Egypt; and his brothers never would have found their way down there when a famine arose in Canaan and they went to their neighbor, seeking food. They never would have been on the wrong side of history when the lines were written, “And a new king arose over Egypt who didn’t know Joseph.”

We know how it unfolded from there. But what we don’t know, in the great unrehearsed play of our lives, is how our story ends. Only we can know that when we choose life, choose blessing, choose peace, and hope for the best.

When the Associated Press officially called the presidential election last Saturday, New York City erupted in celebration. People flooded the streets, cheering, banging pots and pans, honking horns, and calling loved ones to bring in the moment. At the same time, there were pockets in our city, state, and country where over 70 million Americans hung their heads in defeat. Even within the Democratic party, a rift appeared between the moderates and progressives when Republicans flipped seats in the House of Representatives. However we slice it, we can agree that this was an especially contentious election that leaves deep divisions in our country.

This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, provides us with an example of how to come together across major differences. Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael bury their father after what at very best could be considered a distant relationship with each other (Genesis 25:9). In a less favorable view, Isaac and Ishmael had a relationship shaped by jealousy and favoritism. Isaac was Sarah’s precious child of old age, and the inheritor of Abraham’s possessions and covenant while Ishmael was born to Hagar, Abraham and Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant.

In fact, the last time Isaac and Ishmael were in the same place before their father’s burial was at a huge family party for Isaac four chapters earlier. There, Ishmael and his mother Hagar are banished from the family over Abraham’s inheritance (Genesis 21:7-13). In this period of separation, both Isaac and Ishmael endure traumatic events, Isaac nearly sacrificed by his father in the Akeidah narrative (Genesis 22) and Ishmael crying out in the wilderness (Genesis 21:17), without each other to bear witness or lend support.

Isaac and Ishmael, although brothers, belonged to two separate nations — a metaphor I heard about Democratic and Republican voters last week as I flipped through election coverage. This wasn’t enough, however, to keep Isaac and Ishmael apart when it was time to bury their father. Dignifying the deceased is one of the greatest deeds we can perform in Judaism because the deceased can’t pay us back. This holy act superseded all the baggage between the brothers as they put their father Abraham to his eternal rest. In the context of a divided nation, I wonder what those holy acts are that can lift us above our differences. As we transition from one presidency to another, still in the midst of a pandemic, I pray that we can overcome our divisions to work for the dignity and safety of all people as Isaac and Ishmael did Abraham.

A few verses after Isaac and Ishmael bury Abraham, Ishmael passes away (Genesis 25:17). The Torah describes it that he “breathed his last and died,” a specific phrase that is also used to describe the deaths of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses’s brother Aaron. For Ishmael, the son of a maidservant, banished from his home, always second to his brother Isaac, and turned into a separate nation, the Torah puts him in elite company. The Talmud goes on to say that the phrase “breathed his last and died” is only used for righteous people (Bava Batra 16b). The fact that Ishmael is included in this company can teach us that even those from whom we are divided have the capacity to be righteous people. Whether we identify more with Isaac or Ishmael, Democrats, Progressive Democrats, or Republicans, may we come together in this time of division as Isaac and Ishmael did, work for the dignity of all people as they did for their father Abraham, and bring out our collective righteousness in the process.