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I swear to God, if…
The Cowboys win the superbowl…(okay, you now know my allegiance)
I get an A on my test…
I get the promotion…

I will…
Go to synagogue every week…
Study for 10 hours a day …
Donate my raise to charity…

Have you ever had a thought like this? Have you ever wished for something so badly that you swear — and maybe even invoke God — to do something good if that wish comes true? And how many times do you actually fulfill your promise when the desired outcome is achieved?

This type of thinking is sometimes called “karmic bargaining,” a term coined by scholars who study the cognitive origins and nature of religious belief. This reflects the idea that people sometimes “endorse and engage in the practice of performing good acts in order to secure an unrelated future desired outcome.” (Check out an experimental study on the topic published by my two college mentors, Dr. Konia Banerjee and Dr. Paul Bloom!)

Similarly, Jewish tradition understands the power of vows and oaths, of these “karmic bargains” that we sometimes make, and takes them very seriously. Much of this week’s Torah portion, Matot-Masei (the last of the Book of Numbers) discusses the ramifications for making vows, stating: “If a householder makes a vow to Adonai or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he shall not break his pledge; he must carry out all that has crossed his lips” (Numbers: 30:3). In other words, once you swear to do something, there is no turning back.

We see this principle in action in the story of Yiftach in the Book of Judges. Rabbi Tamara Esquenazi and Rabbi Andrea Weiss summarize the story:

“[The Book of] Judges tells of a warrior named Yiftach who vows to sacrifice whoever or whatever comes out from his house should he win a battle (Judges 11:30-31). Tragically, his only child — a daughter — comes out to meet him and thus becomes the promised victim. The daughter, whose name is never revealed, willingly capitulates to her father’s obligation to fulfill his vow” (The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, pp. 991-992).

A prohibition against taking vows appears in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not swear falsely by the name of your God, Adonai; for Adonai will not clear one who swears falsely by God’s name” (Exodus 20:7). A whole tractate of the Talmud, Nedarim, is dedicated to discussing and determining appropriate and inappropriate vows. The Kol Nidre prayer, one of the most dramatic and powerful in all of our Yom Kippur liturgy, is supposed to absolve us of the guilt that comes with a vow that has been made, but not fulfilled, over the past year. Whenever making plans for the future, many modern Jews will include the caveat: bli neder, which loosely translates to “no promises,” just in case the plans don’t pan out, which would render a presumed vow unfulfilled. I’ve sometimes heard people say things like: “I’ll see you next Tuesday, bli neder.”

What is Jewish tradition trying to accomplish with all of these rules (and resulting hesitation and angst) about vows? It’s human nature to make promises that, in the moment, feel urgent and important. But these promises are easy to forget as time moves forward. When we make casual promises, we undermine the sanctity of our word. When we invoke God in these promises, we cheapen God’s very being. Our tradition tries to maintain the sanctity of a promise by limiting its invocation.

Judaism reminds us that our word means everything.

Judaism reminds us that our promises are binding.

Judaism reminds us that our commitments are powerful.

Let’s make them count.

In C.K. Williams’ gorgeous poem, “Time: 1976,” he speaks of the ways in which our present selves make future memories of the past. Read that again. “Time for my break,” he writes, “I’m walking from my study down the long hallway towards the living room…and with no warning I’m taken with a feeling that against all logic I recognize to be regret, as violent and rending a regret as anything I’ve ever felt, and I understand immediately, that all of this familiar beating and blurring, the quickening breath, the gathering despair, almost painful all, has to do with the moment I’m in, and my mind, racing to keep order, thrusts this way and that and finally casts itself, my breath along with it, into the future.”

Since childhood, I have always experienced July 4th as the beginning of the end of summer. Already the anticipation — time’s unbridled freedom; the season’s fertile heat; the long days and mysterious nights — gives way to an introspection that has me looking ahead in preparation for what’s next. And right now, without baseball, it’s even more intense.

Our tradition knows this feeling, too. With the anticipatory “three weeks” of reflection leading to Tisha B’Av and our commemoration of Jerusalem’s ancient destruction, our calendar structures our time in such a way that in the midst of growth, there is a knowledge of tearing down; as we bask in sunshine, there are darkening clouds; after a quickening summer storm, the ground is strewn with fallen twigs and leaves; proving that even in the present, we are always transitioning. And with the pandemic, it’s even more intense.

In this week’s Torah portion, Devarim, we begin to read the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah, in anticipation of the cycle of readings winding down, in the last two months of the Jewish year, reading a volume that the sages and scholars of Jewish civilization agree is fundamentally a recounting of the entire Jewish narrative in the prior four books. The rabbis frame the book as Moses’ ethical will, one long final oration before he passes on, leaving with the people his accumulated wisdom from a lifetime of serving his God and his people. Read that way, Moses uses the closing months of summer to look back, to take stock, to begin, in the present, with one foot planted firmly in the past and the other in the future.

The awe-inspiring maneuverability of the human mind is a thing to behold. As Jews, I dare say, it’s our own “face that launched a thousand ships.” The making of memory is our Homeric epic journey. Introspection and reflection and taking responsibility for our deeds is the wind in our sails. The twin goals of renewal and the walk down a corrected path, point us toward a future that always, year after year, carries the potential for redemption.

This year, in a moment like no other, we have so much reflecting to do. And our hearts ache for connection, for community, for the rays of hope we see in the faces of those we encounter during the High Holy Days. Alas, a global pandemic has restricted our physical nearness but we Jews are a stubborn lot!

At JCP, we are readying our Early Childhood Center and Hebrew School Project for a meticulously planned re-opening. Rabbi Deena and I are laying the foundations for being together ourselves and virtually broadcasting to our community a Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur experience, that will aspire to engage, inspire and comfort each of you with the music and wisdom of our tradition, so that individually and collectively we may return. Return to a greater sense of self and return to deeper and more meaningful connection to one another, to our neighbors, to our fellow citizens, who are all feeling the pain and dislocation of the present while hungering for healing, for kindness, for justice and peace.

Rabbi Deena, Rachel Mintz, Erin Beser and I have each experienced this yearning and hunger for connectedness all summer long. We have seen children’s eyes light up with learning; knocked our heads and souls up against confounding and inspiring texts in our adult learning; and felt, almost improbably, the warmth of one another’s humanity, virtually, at baby namings and brises, at weddings and funerals.

We can record with Zoom and relive these occasions and while our current culture plays and replays, posts and reposts, one cannot imagine the absolute horror and embarrassment of such mass sharing and viewing of our own lives, in the beginning of this season of introspection. The Jewish tradition grabs us by the hand and moves us inward, toward our own souls, our own conscience, our God. In this way, the face that launched a thousand ships becomes the thousand souls cast toward the One, the Source of Life, of Kindness and Peace.

In the enclosed video, Rabbi Deena and I invite you to begin to prepare and to join us in September as we greet the Jewish New Year. “Already?!  It’s not even August!” We know, we know. But as they say, there is no time like the present to look back on the past and step into the future, together.  

In another poem, C.K. Williams writes of sitting in a garden when, “on my hand beside me on the bench, something, I thought somebody else’s hand, alighted: I flinched it off, and saw — sorrow! — a warbler, grey, black, yellow, in flight already away. It stopped near me in a shrub, though, and waited, as though unstartled, as though unafraid, as though to tell me my reflex of fear was no failure, that if I believed I had lost something, I was wrong, because nothing can be lost, of the self, of a lifetime of bringing forth selves. Then it was gone, its branch springing back empty: still oak, though, still rose, still world.”

Wishing you continued good health, good thinking, and good doing.

We made it through. 

Yesterday was Tisha B’Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, a day of deep sorrow in the Jewish calendar. The only 25-hour fast day aside from Yom Kippur, many Jews spend the day in mourning and contemplation. On this day, we commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its Jewish residents, first in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and then again in 70 CE by the Romans. The biblical book of Lamentations, which describes the events, reveals the deep pain and disruption wrought by the tragedy:

“Alas! Lonely sits the city once great with people! She that was great among nations has become like a widow; The princess among states has become a laughingstock. Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her from among her friends. All her allies have betrayed her; they have become her foes” (Lamentations 1:1-2).

The book later describes the dire straits of Jerusalem’s residents: 

“My being melts away over the ruin of my poor people, as babes and sucklings languish In the squares of the city. They keep asking their mothers, “Where is bread and wine?” as they languish like battle-wounded In the squares of the town, as their life runs out In their mothers’ bosoms….See, O Adonai, and behold, to whom You have done this! Alas, women eat their own fruit, their new-born babes!” (Lamentations 2:11-12, 20).

Amidst this anguish, the narrator tries to understand why God would be so cruel. But he finds no answers.

We, too, know very intimately what it is like to live through societal tragedy. We have now witnessed the deaths of over 150,000 Americans to COVID-19. Our lives and families have been disrupted and uprooted, and we are uncertain as to when we will be able to reunite. Businesses have shuttered; people have lost their incomes and their sense of stability. The deep racial inequities in our society have been laid bare.

We, too, have a lament to cry. How did we get here? How has a good God allowed this devastation to happen? How have we?

But just when it feels like there’s no hope, when Jerusalem’s ancient residents can never imagine life returning to the city, when we in 2020 can’t fathom how long it will take for the pandemic to end, we arrive at this Shabbat, called Shabbat Nachamu, or the “Shabbat of Comfort.” 

“Comfort, oh comfort My people
 Says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
And declare to her
That her term of service is over,
That her iniquity is forgiven;
 For she has received at the hand of Adonai
Double for all her sins”
– Isaiah 40:1-2.

Immediately following Tisha B’Av, we read these words of consolation from the prophet Isaiah. At the moment of our deepest pain — pain that feels like it will last a lifetime — we receive the reminder that this time of destruction and darkness we face is just a long moment. It will pass.

In these seven weeks until Rosh Hashanah, as we prepare for the holiest moments of the year, we read a weekly selection from the Prophets (also called a haftarah) filled with words of comfort, hope, and consolation. Yes, we have witnessed devastation. Yes, we have mourned the loss of life. Yes, there is much work to be done to move forward. But just as these prophets reminded the ancient Jews that, impossible as it seemed, joy and vitality would one day return to Jerusalem, they remind us that one day, this pandemic will be behind us. And when it finally passes, we will reunite with our loved ones and together rebuild a world full of light.

Wishing you a Shabbat filled with comfort and hope. 

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
— Philip Larkin

In the weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av, the prophets warn us of Jerusalem’s destruction. In the weeks following, the prophets comfort us with words of consolation, love and the aspiration for return. The binding force of Jewish civilization’s most impassioned interpreters understand that the pain and devastation of exile are wounds healed by hope.

Exile and return. Exile and return. To a significant degree, this dynamic tension is at the center of the Jewish project. A yearning, a longing for an unrecoverable past bound up with an insistence on a future restoration, where finally, all is right.

In this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, Moses reminds the people that if the nation observes the rules that God commands, the covenant will remain viable and the people will be redeemed, just as God redeemed a lowly nation from the indignity and oppression of slavery in Egypt. It is a proposition that is at once hopeful and vexing. Where was the God of Redemption, the Sages ask, when Romans sacked Jerusalem? During the Crusades? The Inquisition? The Holocaust? Or, for that matter, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or The Edmund Pettus Bridge? The list goes on…

Tragedy and suffering are reasons for great theological crises. Our belief is rattled, shaken to its core by the inexplicable acts of destruction which belie the promises of faith and redemption.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who sadly passed away earlier today, writes that “there is nothing like calamity and disaster to bring the nation to its senses, to encourage soul searching.”

The Talmud in Berachot 5a explains, “If a person experiences painful sufferings, let that person examine their conduct. For it is said, ‘Let us search and probe our ways and return to the Eternal’ (Lamentations 3:40). If one examines and finds nothing, let that person attribute it to the neglect of the study of the Torah. For it is said, ‘Happy is the one whom You chasten, Eternal, and teach to that person Torah” (Psalms 94:12). These are chastenings of love, as it is said, “The Eternal loves who the Eternal corrects” (Proverbs 3:12).

Jewish teaching offers us a radical view of the world: that despite our seeming powerlessness in the face of apparently limitless patterns of destruction, we humans are fundamentally responsible for the world in which we live. It is the price we pay for our free will. Just as the first humans strove to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — and whose eyes were thereby opened as God’s — and as a result faced exile from the Garden of Eden, so too must we face the fact of our own radical responsibility for the world we inhabit.

As Jews and Americans, we know this to be true. Though the state of Israel exists, there are still intractable issues of poverty and homelessness, unresolved issues of national security and relationships with Palestinian and Arab neighbors. And while Representative John Lewis laid in state and was lauded as a true hero for sacrificing his own body to the evils of white supremacy, there is still voter suppression, systemic racism, deep-seated injustice.

The Red Sea, so it seems, only needed to be parted once in order to bequeath to us the promise and hope of redemption. The rest is in our hands.

“Do not stand in dread” of what challenges lie before you, God says to the people in this week’s Torah portion. The dislodging of obstacles to our freedom happens “little by little” (Deuteronomy 7:21-22).

In a stunning display of rhetoric and an awe-inspiring demonstration of the scope and span of Jewish history, Moses reminds the people this week of God’s promise: that the Jewish people were freed from Egypt in order to testify to the world that empathy, kindness and sensitivity to human suffering of all kinds is at the very core of Jewish civilization’s worldview.

“For the Eternal your God is God Supreme…who shows no favor, who takes no bribe. But upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow; befriends and provides the stranger with food and clothing; you too must befriend the stranger, for you too were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:17-19).

Radical responsibility. Empathy. Love. Hope. Little by little. Each step brings us closer to the promise of a better world.

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Re’eh, Moses gives the command to worship God only at a central location. While the Torah doesn’t tell us where this is (in fact, the name of the holy site is never mentioned in the Torah), later books of the Bible make it clear: the only legitimate place to serve the God of Israel is Jerusalem. Yes, perhaps an Israelite could send up a prayer from anywhere, but if he dared make a sacrificial offering to God in any place but Jerusalem, he’d better watch out, because destruction would ensue. The Torah teaches:

“Do not worship Adonai your God like [the idolaters], but only look to the site that Adonai your God will choose…to establish the divine name there. There you are to go, and there you are to bring your offerings…Together with your households, you shall feast there before Adonai your God, happy in all the undertakings in which Adonai your God has blessed you” (Deuteronomy 12:4-7).

For hundreds of years, Jerusalem was at the center of Jewish worship and practice. Jews living in Jerusalem witnessed the priests offer daily sacrifices at the Temple as a way to access God’s blessings. Jews living all over the land of Israel made the trek to Jerusalem on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot to offer their sacrifices and commune with the Divine. Imagine the honor of living in Jerusalem, the same city where God’s presence dwelled. Imagine the excitement of traveling for weeks from your small village and arriving at the bustling, dynamic, thriving city of Jerusalem — the holiest place on earth.

Until it all fell apart.

In the year 70 CE, the Temple was destroyed by the Romans and the city of Jerusalem was devastated and uninhabitable. Jews were exiled, forced to abandon their city, and worse, forced to abandon God’s home. Without the Temple in Jerusalem, without the ability to offer sacrifices on the holy altar, what would happen to their faith? Where would they find God? 

After a long period of drifting, a group of Jews called the Rabbis consolidated their authority and revamped their faith so that it could survive in exile. No longer able to gather at a centralized place, they made Judaism portable. In their earliest texts, they claim that Jews no longer needed the Temple in Jerusalem to commune with God; this access was now remote. Prayer of the heart could take the place of ritual sacrifice; study of Torah could provide insight into God’s will; and performing acts of kindness could invoke God’s blessing. Though they longed for a return to Jerusalem and the old way of life, they created a system that would suffice in the meantime.

That system has continued to serve as a substitute for over two thousand years. We simply know it as “Judaism.” The religion that we practice today is actually a re-invention of the system of ritual sacrifice outlined in the Torah. Most other Near Eastern religions contemporaneous with the ancient Israelites were wiped out when their central place of worship was destroyed, their traditions no longer practicable. The ingenuity of the Rabbis was that they transformed a religion dependent on a destroyed location into one that no longer relied on a physical place. Instead, it could be (and is still) practiced anywhere and everywhere, untethered to a geographical site.

Transforming the way that Jews communicated with God must have been a great challenge. After all, we are experiencing a similar period of change, not necessarily in terms of how we connect with God, but in terms of how we connect with each other. The old ways of meeting in coffee shops, offices, homes, and synagogues aren’t viable as they were a mere six months ago. And we are deep into the process of figuring out the new means of connection and communication that must suffice for now. But with the Rabbis as our example, we know that we have the power to adapt to a changing world, and to create something beautiful and even holy. 

Wishing you a Shabbat of connection and blessing.

In summer 2016, I visited my grandmother’s hometown, a small shtetl called Kopyl, near Minsk. I was part of a delegation of American and British Jews who travel to Belarus each summer to memorialize the nearly one million Belarusian Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. The experience was so powerful and meaningful that I have returned to Minsk every year since, visiting sites, reciting prayers, and hearing the testimony of local residents who witnessed the killings.

Arguably the last communist totalitarian regime in Europe, Belarus in 2016 had an eerie quiet to its streets; everything was clean and orderly, and yet its people were clearly not free. The rabbis I met who were serving what remains of Jewish life there were decidedly apolitical, operating on the assumption that the well-being of their Jews was predicated on neutrality in politics. After all, the vast majority of those Jews who remained in Belarus after the war (they were Soviet Jews) suffered mightily from Stalinist and subsequent Russian communist regimes. The sting of that peculiar Soviet anti-Semitism was still keenly felt, painfully remembered, and subtly used as a warning to those who remained, even with the current regime’s occasional allowance for the free expression of religion.

Memorial to the victims of the Kopyl massacre.In 1942, in Kopyl, all the Jews of my grandmother’s town were murdered. It took about eighteen hours. I learned as an adult what was never spoken about when I was a kid growing up in Milwaukee: twenty-eight of the 2965 victims were members of my extended family. My grandmother, who fled from Kopyl to Milwaukee in 1903, never spoke of it to me. Nor did my father. It took my own need to understand my origin story as a young man to begin to put the pieces together. I learned many of these facts from a local librarian, who was not Jewish, but whose father was a boy and witnessed the killings. He taught her to teach others what he saw because such testimony could prevent an atrocity such as that from ever happening again.

You might also know that I have a moderate to large obsession with the Underground Railroad and the extraordinary measures taken by African Americans, enslaved and free, along with white allies, to gain freedom for those held, tortured and murdered against their will. In fact I was struck when in Belarus at how very little of Jewish life would be remembered had Jews not traveled there each year, created memorials, and planted the seeds of knowledge and redemption in a land now absent of Jews. Memories are not our own but are our gifts to a future that will continue to aim for justice. In Belarus, even absent of Jews, our presence is felt. So too, I reasoned, back here in New York. Slavery and the need for the Abolitionist movement may have ended; but through memory the goals of a complete freedom and justice remain.

Walking around New York City, the center of the Abolitionist movement in the United States, one might be struck by the same notion. All the great names we know, from Harriet Tubman to Frederick Douglass, from Sojourner Truth to David Ruggles and countless others, labored here, risked their lives, and planted the seeds of knowledge and redemption so that African Americans could be free and so that the American ideal of “liberty and justice for all” could finally ring true.

New York City lags behind other states’ more substantive efforts to remember this foundational sin of American democracy. If you have ever traveled to Alabama and Mississippi, to Atlanta or Memphis, you know what I mean. Freedom Trails and museums abound. Memorialization ensures like a torch of truth and hope that such abominable actions will never happen again.

In Delaware and Maryland where I have been staying for the past two weeks, there are a number of markers in places relevant to the lives of both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Now lush fields of private farms, these corners of land where both were born into servitude were once part of a vast plantation network. In the hot sun on a summer day, with cicadas singing eerie remembrances, locust-like warnings of an exodus sure to come, it’s not hard to feel the need to run for freedom. And the waterways of the Eastern Shore, the Chesapeake’s ample power to save, explains it all. Called the Moses of her people, Harriet Tubman fled and returned on numerous occasions, delivering to freedom countless enslaved persons. Beaten, tortured, but never into submission, she performed miracles of her own, affirming the Talmudic adage, “She who saves one life is reckoned as if she has saved the entire world.”

Between the cornfields in Easton, Maryland, and the sandy streets of Baltimore, Frederick Douglass defied the law and learned to read and write, eventually becoming one of the most prolific orators and eloquent spokespeople for freedom and justice in all of Western civilization. It is humbling and inspiring to stand in these places.

If God said to Cain when he slew his brother Abel that “Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the land,” then surely in the places where Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought for freedom for their people, God says, “Your sisters’ and brothers’ battle for justice cries out to Me from the land.”

I’ve stood there. I swear you can hear it.

צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ֣ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָֽךְ׃

Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

In this week’s Torah reading, Shoftim, we hear Moses tell the people that the price we pay for the privilege of living in the land is to never waver from pursuing justice. So critical is this message that the word for justice is repeated.

The commentator Ibn Ezra explains that the word is repeated because one is obligated to pursue justice whether one is to gain or lose. We are servants of justice and its ideals, he argues.

Several other rabbis throughout Jewish history have understood that the word “justice” is repeated here because the pursuit of justice is ongoing; it is never complete.

How true.

In the quiet city of Minsk last week, 200,000 people turned out to protest an unfair election. Following closely my ancestral homeland, it’s frightful to imagine the violence that may result but the determination for freedom and justice is empowering a nation for the first time. It is remarkable to behold.

Similarly, our own streets in America, throughout the past several months, have broiled with the ongoing injustice of our own peculiar American racism. The whiplash effect of the pride and joy of an African American and South Asian woman nominated for the office of vice president while vast inequalities continue to exist is proof that each victory we achieve begets more work to be done.

The reward for a mitzvah, the rabbis teach, is another mitzvah.

Let’s keep going in the pursuit of justice: for our people, for all people, so that we all may be free.

We are now entering the month of Elul, the last month on the Hebrew calendar before Tishri brings us Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is a sacred time for reflection and action, an examination of our souls and the opportunity to begin anew. Follow along on Instagram (@jcpdowntown) and Facebook each day, as we invite you to seek your own inspiration from these teachings.

Etz Chayyim Hee. The Torah is a Tree of Life. Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peaceful (Proverbs 3:17-18). These are the words we say each time we return the Torah to the ark. But sometimes it can be hard to believe that the Torah is so pleasant and peaceful when we read certain troubling passages found within it.

Take this week’s Torah portion, for example. The opening of Parashat Ki Teitzei is pretty grim. In the first few verses alone, we learn that the Israelites were permitted to take women as prisoners of war and forcibly marry them; that it was normal for men to have multiple wives, one of whom he could love at the expense of another; and that criminals were executed through impaling on a stake.

All its paths are peaceful? Doesn’t seem like it.

Of course, the Torah is a text that is of its time, written in an era where the norms of society were quite different than they are today. Women were fair game as war captives, multiple wives were commonplace (Jewish law only forbade polygamy in the 10th century), and children were seen simply as adults in small bodies… child development would not even begin to be understood until more than 2,000 years after this text was written.

When we read these challenging texts of the Torah through our modern lens of morality, fairness, and ethics, we might want to discount its teachings. However, if we are willing to understand the Torah on its own terms, we will see how the instructions it gives are principled and just.

When the Torah tells Israelite men that they are permitted to take enemy women as captives, it instructs them to take the feelings of the woman into account: “She shall spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that…she shall be your wife” (Deuteronomy 21:13). In other words, this woman cannot be expected to become her captors’ wife immediately; she must be given time to mourn for her family.

When the Torah discusses the estate of a man who has two wives, one of whom is “loved” and one of whom is “unloved,” it forbids him from favoring the child of the wife he loves. Instead, he must leave his estate to the eldest child, even if the eldest happens to be the son of the unloved wife.

When the Torah discusses capital punishment, it teaches that the body of the executed person must be treated with respect. The corpse cannot be left out overnight. Instead, it must be buried on the day of the execution.

All of these instructions in the Torah, though given in the context of circumstances that we find abhorrent today, serve to place an important check on human instincts. A man might want to take a woman captured in a war as his wife, but she must be given time to grieve her old life beforehand. A man might want to favor the child of his beloved wife, but his obligation to his eldest comes first. A person might want to leave the corpse of a criminal to rot and decay overnight, but, perhaps counter to instinct, it must be treated with dignity and buried properly.

While the context is different, we can also follow the Torah’s instructions to ensure that our own lives are filled with empathy, concern, and care for others. That’s what the upcoming High Holy Days, and Hebrew month of Elul, are for. While we certainly aren’t taking anyone captive and marrying them, we can give our loved ones the time and space they need to grieve when they mourn a loss. We can fulfill our obligations to our children no matter how hard that may be. And we can treat all people with dignity and respect, even if they have been labeled as criminals.

The scenarios outlined in the Torah might be of their time, but the lessons of the Torah are eternal. Human instinct is often to take the easy way out, to do what is most convenient for us at the time, and not to consider the feelings of others when we act. The Torah cautions us against this, and teaches that acting with fairness and justice is the most important commitment we can make.

When you enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where the LORD your God will choose to establish His name.

You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, “I acknowledge this day before the LORD your God that I have entered the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to assign us.” The priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down in front of the altar of the LORD your God.

You shall then recite as follows before the LORD your God: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.

The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us.

We cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The LORD freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

SO opens this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo. Moses’ instruction to the people is crystal clear: Our freedom is to be celebrated with thanksgiving and generosity; our freedom is to be acknowledged, codified and exemplified in the telling of our story of having lived the indignity, pain and suffering of slavery; our freedom is to be enacted by seeing the ancestors not as exemplars of a long-gone past but as us.

The I of a Jew’s individual life is the We of the Jewish people. Personal identity and communal identity, for better or worse, are inextricably bound, one to the other.

During this critical moment of American history, we Jews have an opportunity and a responsibility to know our story, to tell our story, and to exemplify our story’s values for the greater good of American society.

Yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, presidential candidate Joe Biden said, “‘we’re finally now getting to the point’ of addressing ‘the original sin: slavery. And all the vestiges of it.’”

Politics aside, this statement is very Jewish. It echoes what Moses commands of the people here. It states, fundamentally, that American history begins with slavery (“my father was a fugitive Aramean”); and American history can only proceed into an American present that acknowledges suffering and offers sacrifice and thanksgiving in order to safeguard the sacred relationship, the covenant, of living as a free people in a free land.

Imagine generations of Americans — all Americans — sitting down once each year for a holiday meal and reciting the story of slavery, recounting the suffering of “our ancestors,” celebrating the victory of the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War, mourning the loss of all human life, and then singing songs of freedom and redemption.

It may seem impossible to consider. But not if we consider that even the first haggadah, likely composed in Mishnaic times (approximately between 100 BCE and 200 CE), was codified nearly 1300 years after the Exodus from Egypt took place. It pains us to realize that the wounds of slavery, the anger, the resentments — all justified in my opinion — of its ongoing and yes, systemic legacy are still very fresh, very contemporary, very real. It is mind-boggling to think that we may as a nation require decades, perhaps centuries more, before real healing can occur.

The good news is, we just don’t have that much time to wait. And this kind of sacred impatience is precisely what we need.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

If not now, when?

Labor Day, which we celebrate as Americans this coming Monday, like so many national holidays, has become a shadow of its former self. The first Labor Day parade, in New York City in 1882, was staged by the Central Labor Union of Machinists to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.” Over the next decade, states slowly adopted the holiday and in 1894 President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.

Of course, in 1894 in America, post-Civil War Reconstruction had been dismantled and Jim Crow Laws codified the next 70 years of suffering for American Blacks. According to the Library of Congress, 134 Black Americans were lynched in 1894; 113 Black Americans were lynched in 1895; and 78 Black Americans were lynched in 1896. As most law students will remember from early outlining assignments, 1896 was the year of Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation and “separate but equal” the law of the land.

Sometimes one person’s holiday is another person’s nightmare. We Jews know this as well as anyone. On Easter we were persecuted for “killing Jesus.” Christmas pageants and celebrations banned Jews from appearing in public in Europe for centuries. But the holiday on the Jewish calendar most celebrated by Jews is the Passover Seder, the ultimate story of freedom from slavery. And it’s no wonder. The tale of our triumph is unique among other cultures precisely because our victory is not just a parade and celebration with delicious food; it is a public declaration to be kind to the stranger in our midst because we were once slaves in Egypt. This line of Torah is repeated more than any other line in the Jewish tradition.

God doesn’t mince words. It’s just that important to understand.

So as we safely gather this weekend with our loved ones; as we cherish the privilege of being free; let us also celebrate the privilege of being Jews, of knowing our words, of knowing our story, and let’s recommit ourselves to love our neighbors, care for those most in need, and bring healing and understanding to all in order to build a world of justice and peace.

If I were to make a personal list of the “Top Ten Greatest Torah Quotes,” (like those lists made about movie lines), many excerpts from this week’s Torah portion, Nitzavim, would make the cut.

It is in this Torah portion that God renews the covenant made with the Israelites and claims, “I make this covenant… not with you alone, but… with those who are not with us here this day.” To whom is this referring? The Medieval commentator, Ibn Ezra, teaches: “[This covenant is created] not with you alone, but rather, with you, and with those who shall come after you: your children, and your children’s children.” In other words, it is as though we, Jews alive today in 2020, are written into the Torah, and that God is making this covenant with us.

It is in this Torah portion where God says, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” God tells us we will always be presented with moral choices and it is within our power to make these choices as Jews, a people connected to a God who loves goodness and righteousness.

It is in this Torah portion where God says, “Surely, this Instruction [the Torah] which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, it is very close to you, within your heart and your spirit.” In other words, God gives us the confidence of knowing that observing the Torah is not impossible. Though it might be hard, and though it demands much of us, we can indeed live by its dictates of fairness and justice.

I cherish these epic statements. They make me feel as though the Torah is speaking directly to me, to all of us who identify as Jews today, to all those who came before us, and to all those who will follow, long after we are gone.

* * * * * * *

But there is another statement that God makes in this Torah portion. It’s not dramatic, and it’s not very well known. Yet this week, as we approach our holiest season of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and as we mark the 19th anniversary of 9/11, it felt particularly meaningful to me:

“Concealed acts concern Adonai our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching, this Torah.”

What does this mean, exactly? It’s hard to know. The ancient Rabbis believe that this is a provision created by God to protect the Israelites. So long as a Jew transgresses the Torah in private, God will not punish the entire community for this sin. Only when the defiance is public must others intervene and guide the sinner back to the right path, lest everyone suffer God’s wrath.

This might not feel as relevant to us, but perhaps the idea of “concealed” and “overt” acts can mean something different for us today.

There are certain things about other people — their motivations, beliefs, and behaviors — that we will simply never understand. These “concealed” aspects of people, the aspects we cannot comprehend, can lead to public questions: “What could possibly lead a terrorist to take the lives of thousands of others in the name of faith?” Or they can be more private, personal questions about those in our lives whose behavior baffles us. Why do friends, family members, colleagues, strangers, act in ways that hurt us?

We will never know the answers to these questions. The Torah tells us that these behaviors are concealed to our own ability to comprehend. We cannot reckon with them, nor can we try to understand them. They are between a person and their God.

But overt acts are different. Overt acts are our own actions, the behaviors that we can control and understand. We will never be able to comprehend why people harm one another. But we can be there for our loved ones and listen to them when they are hurt. We will never be able to understand the actions of a terrorist. But we can (and JCP continues to) repair a community in the wake of devastation.

There are some things only God can understand. But that doesn’t rid us of our own obligation to take action in the face of pain and harm. Indeed, the Torah tells us, “it is for us and our children,” ever to be a presence of goodness, kindness, and justice, which are the “provisions of this Teaching, this Torah.”

Shanah Tovah to all of you in our JCP Community here in New York and in our broader Jewish community. We have learned so much in these past months about human resilience, quiet acts of monumental heroism, and an overwhelming desire to remain connected to each other in the most trying of times.

The challenges before us on this particular New Year are both unique to this year and also have the feeling of being greater than us, greater than one generation, greater than any single moment in time.

As we begin these High Holy Days, let’s do so in the spirit of peace and reconciliation; in the quietude of reflection and in the urgent insistence on taking action to build a better world.

With gratitude to our leadership for their stalwart and inspiring generosity; and with enormous pride in our teachers and staff and new rabbi who have brought us through to this moment, I wish you all a Sweet New Year of good health, prosperity, and peace.

And now, some thoughts on this Rosh Hashanah to help us focus on the big picture of a very big day, the start of a ten day journey of reflection toward a new path forward for ourselves, our families, our community and our world.

* * * * * * *

During my first year of rabbinical school, alone in the library late one afternoon, I met Rabbi Bernie Zlotowitz, of blessed memory, who was ensconced in his own meditation and study of a variety of texts. We started chatting. He asked what I was going to do for my first High Holy Days sermon and I admitted no small amount of trepidation. Why did you get into this racket? he asked. To teach, I said. So teach, he said.

Good advice. Do what you know. Do what you feel best about. Do it well. And do it over and over again.

Bernie went to retrieve an article he had written and published in an academic journal. He wanted to make the claim that the scriptural readings for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were chosen by the rabbis to structure a polemical argument in relationship to Christianity, which by the Middle Ages, when much of the ritual for the holy days was codified and printed, was the dominant system under which most Jews lived.

The notion of faith systems colliding with each other, borrowing from each other, and regrettably and tragically going to war against each other is a story as old as the hills. Not to mention at times a story that is inexcusably embarrassing in its lack of regard for practicing the love and peace all faiths are meant to practice.

Under the best circumstances, of course, argumentation and disagreement are carried out “for the sake of Heaven,” that is to say for the purposes of unifying our understanding of the Divine around a shared purpose, like peace, justice or compassion. Every faith system demands its adherents to practice these ideas through concrete action. And while we may have many paths from which to choose, we can be confident enough in our own identities to debate finer points in the broader marketplace of ideas. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Atheists and Agnostics surely share a belief in peace, justice and compassion. We just tell different stories for how we get there. Like Google Maps, I guess, there are different routes to the same place. Arrival times altered by a mere minute or two, but in the context of Eternity, does it really matter?

Thus, Rabban Gamliel, an early sage in the Greco-Roman period, decreed that at the Passover Seder one must explain to the table the meaning of “Pesach, Matzah and Maror” by holding up each to the table and teaching very directly and very clearly what they are: The Pesach is the lamb our ancestors sacrificed when they left Egypt; the Matzah is the bread of haste, baked quickly to facilitate our Exodus; and the Maror is the bitter herb of the slave labor under which we suffered. This educational act is so fundamental to Jewish understanding that small children learn these ideas right alongside songs about hammers and work and frogs and shaking angry fingers at imagined pharaohs in Jewish classrooms around the world each year.

By one small tilt of the lens one can see that Rabban Gamliel is saying what these objects are NOT: Here, the lamb is not Jesus, the “lamb of God”; the Matzah is not a wafering offering of the Eucharist; and the Maror is not his bitter suffering on the cross for the world. They are our stories, our symbols. And while they may have other meanings for others, memory requires that they maintain their force by an eternal bind to our sacred history.

This is what scholars refer to as polemical literature. It is meant to convey a certain argument; even censor out some ways of thinking while codifying others. And I think this is most fundamentally done because our personal stories matter; our individual experiences of the world are unique to our existence and the ability and dignity to tell them is what makes us feel, well, special.

So one can imagine that Rabban Gamliel is concerned that a nascent Christianity is going to appropriate symbols of Judaism for its new narrative and so he builds a rhetorical fence as if to say that these three things are still what they are. We use them to tell our story our way and that matters because the story we share also says that each of us are “made in the Divine Image,” each unique, no one inherently better than the other. Each of us is radically individual while bound together with others, a family perhaps, a whole, with shared origins, texts, songs, language, music, food, geography, calendar, history and values.

Back in the library Bernie made his point. Consider the writings for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he said. Same thing. Sarah, miracle birth; Abraham, sacrifice of Isaac; Jonah in the belly of the whale for three days before being “resurrected” back onto the land.

It was a clever argument and, in the context of learning for pure learning’s sake, it’s a great lesson to address in interfaith dialogues. It’s a good time.

Roots have always fascinated me. The act of excavating our minds and our stories to uncover lost truths remains one of the most exciting aspects of being alive. And I dare say that the structure of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is also an invitation into the invaluable experience of going to our origin stories year in and year out precisely at a moment where we celebrate not just the New Year, but the Creation of the Universe in all its beauty, wonder and awe; the diversity of its life forms; and our own responsibility to cherish, to care for, to tend to this world we inhabit.

But what is interesting is that our readings for Rosh Hashanah are not about the Creation but rather are about the origins of Abraham and Sarah’s Jewish family.

Prior to meeting these first Jews, God creates the universe. And with a specific order in mind. Light. Darkness. Good. Evil. Every plant, every animal for land, air and ocean. God then creates free will, choice and human agency.

And to be clear, none of the first several characters in the Biblical narrative are Jews. They are forms, memes even, in order to illustrate a unified vision for what the human actually is. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, introducing morality. They are expelled from the garden, demonstrating that there are consequences to our actions. Cain and Abel introduce rivalry, anger, envy, spite and murder. Noah, so very human, runs away from the call to serve. He hides, like we often do. And the Tower of Babel argues that there are limits to the human project. We will only ever get so high. Or, as God would eventually say to Moses, “No one shall see my face and live.”

And so in this way, I’d like to suggest that what precedes the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis is a kind of pre-historical origin story which celebrates what unites all of humankind. And with Abraham and Sarah on the scene, we are invited into “our” story; to our particular and peculiar ways of doing things that make us Jews unique among the other families of the earth.

“On Rosh Hashanah it is written; on Yom Kippur it is sealed.” Our deeds are recorded. Our deeds are addressed in the Heavenly Court. Our fate is sealed. Who will live and who will die? Who will be written into the Book of Life for another year?

Terrifying way to start a year, isn’t it? I guess it helps explain why we are among the smaller religions on the planet.

But consider for a moment the following structure:

Rosh Hashanah is a time for making our accounting first from the place of origins. We all come from somewhere. Good families, bad families. Healthy families, dysfunctional families. Families that carry wounds and traumas and triumphs and successes lightly or as a heavy load but a multitude of experiences nevertheless. Abraham and Sarah’s struggle with pregnancy; Hagar’s relative ease in giving birth to Ishmael; Ishmael’s mistreatment of Isaac and Sarah’s defensive move to banish Hagar and Ishmael. This could not have been an easy home to inhabit. Or immediately following this episode, Abraham answers a call from God to sacrifice Isaac. Father and son say very little to one another and if we read the text closely, they never speak again, though Abraham arranges Isaac to marry Rebekah and Isaac and Ishmael are reunited at their father Abraham’s funeral.

There is conflict and pain and hurt and there is time, and healing and even reconciliation. That’s how families operate. Love can cause pain, even lasting pain; but love can, in the end, redeem. Sacrifice hurts; sacrifice requires choice and consequence; but the work required in any act of sacrifice has a co-equal reaction perhaps best summarized by the phrase, “No pain, no gain.”

To get to justice, to get to peace, to get to compassion, one must work, work, and work some more.

It’s a hard message but it’s true. And in many ways for many people, those first lessons are wrought in the warmth of the fire of family life. For while it is surely true that each of us “comes from somewhere,” it is also true that each of us is going somewhere, too.

On Rosh Hashanah we are entering holy time, sacred space, familiar and familial narratives that tell us who we are right now but also push us to strive for a continual unfolding of who we are yet to become. Our family stories are not who we are but they are the shared place from which we came. Going back to the beginning of the year is not so much an act of wiping the slate clean as it is a return to a familiar place with a new beginning.

What have I learned in the last year? How have I grown? How have I not? And what wisdom will I move forward with in the New Year ahead?

In the last half year of obsessive hand-washing, sanitizing and mask wearing, it certainly is a temptation to want to wipe the slate clean, isn’t it? Vote him in. Vote him out. Start over. Reset.

Nope.

We Jews, as well as anyone, know the power of memory, the deep roots of the past, and the moral responsibility to remember and never forget. And just as Rosh Hashanah is meant to be the day the universe came into existence, Rosh Hashanah is also a Yom Hazikaron — a day of remembrance.

Whether it is the alarming news that a dangerously high percentage of young Americans lack a serious understanding of the Holocaust; or the mind-bending and potentially history altering peace treaties between Israel and a growing number of Arab nations; we Jews know that memory of what once was can always guide us toward a path illuminated by the aspirations of what can be.

And as Americans at this critical juncture in our history, we can tell this story, too. Memory matters. It matters when we “say their names”; it matters when women in forced detention get involuntary hysterectomies and we are aware as Americans and Jews of having been subjected to human experimentation; it matters when we see that this pandemic doesn’t care about your faith or gender or the color of your skin but it does attack those most vulnerable among us, like “the poor, the stranger, the widow and the orphans” of Scripture whom we are commanded to care for because we, in our history, were once so vulnerable when we were slaves in Egypt. For an empathic world, for a just world, for a world at peace, history and memory are the necessary signposts, to guide us along the way.

History and memory are our hope. And just as Abraham and Sarah were challenged, in building their family, to be a light unto the nations, so too might we American Jews offer a vision forward for a nation so brutally torn over partisan politics, racial injustice, anti-Semitism, regional conflict, class warfare. Oh, to wipe the slate clean indeed.

But unfortunately, that is not an option. Old habits are not the only things that die hard. So too does memory; acquired from experience or learned from books, we take the past into us in various ways and then, like new seeds, plant new life, nurture and grow it.

One scholar, David Roskies, makes the case that the rabbinic approach to history is to implode it, “to cut it down to a manageable size.” And in so doing, to emphasize the collective over the individual, the family over the self, the nation over rank divisions.

There is much wisdom here. Honoring and respecting what was — in our families or in the broader collective — as the new possible emerges. But simultaneously never forgetting, even that which is most painful, in order to develop and sequence into the future a DNA of justice, freedom and compassion for every human being on earth.

So around our tables, on Zoom and with loved ones, we celebrate on Rosh Hashanah the awe and wonder and messiness and craziness of what it means to be a Jewish family, however that is defined. We see ourselves in its mirror for a flash while knowing with full hearts that the Source of Living Water, the flow of life is ever-changing, never the same, forever new.

On Rosh Hashanah we remember not to forget where we come from; and on Yom Kippur, in ten days, we declare as solitary and unique individuals in the collective prayers of the whole, that we have chosen a new direction, a new way, predicated on the old, that insists on the redeeming values of love and peace.

Gmar Hatimah Tovah.

May you be written and sealed into the Book of Life for another year of well-being, blessing, good health and peace.