GOD WRITES TO JAMES DOBSON

Dear Dr. Dobson:

I briefly interrupted my grieving over the deaths of the children and teachers murdered in Newtown, Connecticut to consider your recent comments concerning the massacre. This is part of what you said on your international radio program:

“Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I'm not talking politically, I'm not talking about the result of the November sixth election. I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God. I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist, or he's irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too. And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God almighty, and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on. We’re seeing things happen that didn’t happen just a few years ago, and there’s a reason for it. Something has gone wrong in this country.”

I created those innocents who were murdered by Adam Lanza. I created Adam Lanza. I mourn deeply that My defenseless creations could be mercilessly destroyed by another of My creations whose brain went utterly out of control, as his soul plunged into pure evil. I also created you, and like every other human being, I gave you moral and behavioral freedom. You claim that in Newtown I wreaked judgment upon America. Please stop speaking in My name and engaging in dangerous perversions of faith.

We are not going to argue about abortion and gay marriage right now, but you dare not forget that the people whose lives you condemn are made in My image no less than you are. Enough said. Let me instead argue against your dark insinuation that I would use a mass murderer as an instrument of judgment, punishment and warning to Americans. This assertion ultimately robs humans of moral freedom and responsibility by asserting that our most horrible behaviors are really just a part of My great plan for sinful humanity. Further, it’s true that Western religion developed early on the belief that I punish communities and individuals for their sins through nature and human violence. However, early in the Bible, Abraham took Me to task for even contemplating destroying the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah without first sparing the innocent people living there. He challenged Me, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” The ideas and values of communities of faith developed along with their sacred texts. The prophet Ezekiel repudiated an earlier belief that children will die for the sins of their parents. The book of Job utterly rejected the earlier biblical idea that if good people suffer evil, they are being punished by Me for their hidden sins. People’s perspectives about Me have developed and grown. Why haven’t yours?

I’ll assume that your beliefs about Me are sincere and that you are genuinely concerned for the health of America’s children, as you explained on your show. However, have you not forgotten other teachings of Mine that should be of equal or greater concern to you? What about your obligation as a person of faith to help those who suffer, or at least not to make them suffer more because of your words? What about the book of Psalms’ warning that you guard your tongue from speaking evil? What about your sacred obligation to support those who mourn? Some people take perverse comfort from your words because, as obscene as they are, they offer simple explanations and solutions for the most baffling tragedies: evil would no longer plague humanity if everyone just returned to basic biblical principles and averted My wrath. Trust Me, as a God of mystery, I assure you that with respect to human evil, even I am often mystified.

There are those who dismiss you as a bigoted crackpot who should be ignored. However, you are much more than that: you are a high profile psychologist and powerful evangelical leader whose daily Family Talk radio show is estimated to reach two hundred million listeners worldwide. Use your unprecedented influence to foster inclusive national dialogue about what ails America and to teach the best values of religion without distorting My image. Otherwise, My name and the memories of those who died will have been desecrated.

FOR THE MIRACLES

Dvar Tefillah For Shabbat Mikketz/Hanukkah 5773.

The American philosopher, George Santayana, is famous for his dire warning that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. However, Santayana who was a confirmed atheist, also had much to say about religion and the true nature of the world. One of his statements that is most interesting to me, if not particularly deep, is this one about miracles: “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.” What I find so strange about this statement is Santayana’s extraordinarily narrow definition of a miracle as something that is assumed to be outside of the natural order, thus setting up a philosophical strawman which can be easily knocked down. Since science has proven to us the ironclad laws of nature, it is a scientific fact that the laws of nature cannot be altered. Anything amazing that you and I call a miracle in the religious sense is nothing more than a lucky, blessed accident that is based in nature as well, even if you and I don’t understand it. To argue anything else is to brand oneself an ignoramus who replaces science with silly superstition.

Can the miraculous be defined in only one way? What about all of those phenomena within the natural world that imbue us with a sense of wonder and awe precisely because they are too complicated and mysterious to be understood? What about the things that human beings do as a natural part of being human that nevertheless are so extraordinary they overwhelm us with a sense of their miraculous power? A holiday like Hanukkah pushes the envelope of our definitions of miracles precisely by refusing to make them either/or propositions about reality and faith.

An excellent example of this is the prayer, Al Hanissim, which thanks God for the miracle of saving us from King Antiochus and his Syrian-Greek army many thousands of years ago. My translation, which is taken from the new Siddur Sim Shalom, is somewhat more literal than that of the Siddur’s editors:

We thank You for the miracles, for the deliverance, for the heroism, and for the triumphs that You performed for our ancestors from ancient days at this time of the year.

In the days of Mattathias, son of Yohanan, the heroic Hasmonean Kohen, and in the days of his sons, a cruel power rose against Your people Israel, demanding that they abandon Your Torah and violate Your mitzvot. You, in Your great mercy, stood by Your people in time of trouble. You defended them, vindicated them, and avenged their wrongs. You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the corrupt into the hands of pure in heart, the guilty into the hands of the innocent. You delivered the arrogant into the hands of those who were faithful to Your Torah. You have revealed Your glory and Your holiness to all the world, achieving great victories and miraculous deliverance for Your people Israel to this day. Then Your children came into Your shrine, cleansed Your Temple, purified Your sanctuary, and kindled lights in Your sacred courts. They set aside these eight days as a season for giving thanks and chanting praises to You.

Since every text has a context, we should note that Al HaNissim is placed in the Amidah prayer immediately following Modim, the prayer that expresses gratitude to God for the daily miracles of being alive. Two early rabbinic sources are clear that this is where Al HaNissim must be placed; in fact, the Hebrew phrase Al HaNissim, which means literally, “For the miracles,” is a direct echo of the phrase in Modim that praises God for daily miracles, “Al nisekha she-b’khol yom imanu.” This placement and repetition of phrases hints at a connection between our ancestors’ victory over Greek oppression and the common nature of the miraculous: their ability to vanquish the evil king Antiochus was a miracle, but it was not something that happened outside of the normal course of nature and the world.

This idea is played out in two other ways in the prayer. It makes clear that it was God who stood up for the Jewish people and defeated our enemies who sought to destroy us. However, as we know from ancient history, the way that God did this was through the determination of the Maccabees and the people, who steadfastly refused to allow the Greek armies and government to trample our rights to live freely and securely as Jews. The miraculous salvation may have been entirely God’s doing, but none of it would have happened without the thoroughly human resistance to oppression. Finally, what about the story of Hanukkah did you notice is missing from this synoptic account of the Hasmonean revolt? The Talmud’s account of the miraculous way in which the little jug of oil burned for eight days, a miracle quite outside of nature and frankly pretty unbelievable, is nowhere to be found in this prayer. This is the case despite the fact that Al HaNissim was likely composed around the same time that the early Tannaim, the sages of the Mishnaic period, were teaching that story about the jug of oil burning brightly for eight days.

Al HaNissim is a more subtle and sophisticated response to Santayana’s rather dismissive critique of the religious perspective on miracles. It does not ask the believer to park his or her intellectual and spiritual honesty at the door. It is a prayerful expression of what the Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev refers to as nissim she-b’tokh ha-teva: God’s great miracles that happen precisely within the context of nature and normal, profane human affairs. They are not miraculous because God mysteriously undoes the regular order of the universe to right wrongs and change tragedy to triumph. They are miraculous because you and I find the mysterious power of divine love and justice within that order and use it in our struggle to bring light to a darkened world.

ALL’S “WELL” THAT ENDS “WELL.”

Dvar Torah For Parshat Toledot 5773.

When is retreating from conflict weakness and when is it wisdom? When should one fight and when should one flee? The three stories of Isaac’s retreat from the wells that he had dug in the face of opposition from his Philistine neighbors hold more than one answer to these questions. Let’s review what we read in the Torah portion this morning. Isaac echoes his father, Abraham by claiming that Rebecca is his sister in order to avoid harassment or being killed by the locals when he journeys into the territory of Avimelekh, the Philistine king of the city of Gerar. This morally problematic tale of our ancestor forfeiting his wife’s physical and emotional integrity is nonetheless an accurate description of how nomadic heads of household may well have survived the salacious advances of the populations in which they were guests during ancient times. Likely the story is meant to describe Isaac’s actions, not praise them, as we can see from Avimelekh’s far more ethical outrage at Isaac’s deceptiveness.

The Torah then tells us that, having settled in or near Gerar, Isaac reaps one hundred times the amount of produce that he had planted, and during a famine no less. He grows so great in livestock and agriculture that he incurs the jealous wrath of the Philistines, who stop up the wells that had belonged to his father and that had become Isaac’s possession. Avimelekh warns him to leave the area because he has grown too much, thus compromising the king’s ability to protect him, according to some commentators. Twice, Isaac’s servants dig new wells, only to have their ownership belligerently contested by the local shepherds. These wells are named by him Esek and Sitnah, “Conflict” and “Hatred.” Only on the third try, after moving out of Gerar altogether, is Isaac able to dig wells without incurring hostility, so he names those wells Rehovot, “Wide Spaces.” Avimelekh and his dignitaries then visit Isaac in his new home and conclude a pact of peace with him, for they realize that God has blessed him. He is a man of power. At the very day this happens, Isaac’s servants inform him that Abraham’s wells which Isaac had attempted to re-open are full of water.

On the surface, we can read this story of Isaac’s retreat from his rightful property in two ways: either as an example of strategic retreat by a smart man who knows that he lacks the power to overcome his opponents who are stealing from him; or as an example of a cowardly man who easily relinquishes whatever is valuable to him –his wife, his property- to save his own neck. Let me suggest a more subtle, contextual reading. The Torah makes very clear that Isaac is a good guest of, and later, a treaty partner with Avimelekh. He is also blessed BY God, so that he becomes insanely wealthy and well fed in the midst of a famine. Isaac at times may be strategic and at other times he may be a coward, but this time he is a man who loves peace and courageously pursues it. He knows full well that, though it is no fault of his own, Avimelekh’s people are hungry, restive and hostile. He has nothing to prove to himself about his power, and he certainly has no reason to hurt his friend and patron the king. So, Isaac engages in a real act of courage: he backs off for the sake of not rubbing his good fortune in the faces of those who are suffering, with whom he is a neighbor. Note however that his willingness to compromise is only so elastic. God has already told him that he may not leave the land in order to sojourn in Egypt. Isaac may be ready to give his neighbors physical and emotional breathing room by contracting his own presence among them. However, he is not prepared to let them drive him out altogether. He recognizes that good fences may make good neighbors, but only when one person’s fence doesn’t become his neighbor’s graveyard.

It is not easy to be Isaac. One needs to know how to retreat for the sake of peace with others, but to do so in a way that leaves one’s integrity and security intact. This requires a careful balance of ego and self-respect with humility and greater vision: a vision of peace and community that transcends one’s immediate needs, hurt pride, or fear. It is not easy to be Isaac, whether we are talking about a family member, an employee working with others, a neighbor, a citizen, a leader in a badly divided congress, or a sovereign state of Israel that is trying to defend herself from the attacks of people whose territory she left years ago. Nonetheless, Isaac is the role model we need to emulate at every level of relationship. Thus we will truly be able to insure that all’s well that ends well.

THE END.

Dvar Torah For Kohelet/Shabbat Hol Hamoed 5773.

“And in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love that you make.”

Paul McCartney and the Beatles ended their iconic White Album with this seemingly irrelevant couplet of poetry that was part of a song called, appropriately, The End. What fascinates me is how memorable these two lines have become in the history of music and musical lyrics, as if their words were somehow the most important wisdom ever taught to humankind. Apart from their catchy tune, the Fab-4’s cute little harmony, and the one-finger piano work that backs them up, the words of this little poem actually pack a whole cosmos of ideas into very little verbal space.
Think about it. In sixteen words, we are taught that in the final analysis, the wisdom to end all wisdom is this: the quantity of love you, or I, or the world receives is directly related to the quantity that we give. Underlying such a grand idea is the even grander idea that all love and hate, peace and war exist in an almost karmic balance of cause and effect that is the result of free human initiative. You and I are at liberty to put out however much love we choose, and it is a firm universal law that we will get back what we gave in equal measure. The Beatles are perhaps unconsciously echoing here the classic Talmudic concept of middah k’neged middah, measure for measure.

These are great and powerful ideas, but their truth value is limited. The truth is that there are people who take plenty of love and a whole lot more from plenty of other people, yet who give very little love back; and there are lots of people in the world who give lovingly and unstintingly of themselves, yet who still get abused, neglected, or exploited by others. Love does not work its way magically into everyone’s heart, and relationships are often the settings for terrible heartbreak when the person who loves is repaid with selfishness and dismissiveness. Love is a fickle fellow, whether in the realm of romance, friendship, or life in community. It often needs to be balanced by other human endeavors and qualities to insure that in its absence people don’t get hurt. The end of the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, that we are about to chant offers us its own final-analysis wisdom about how to achieve this balance. Look with me briefly at the very last verse of chapter 12, on page 78 of your Megillah books. There we read:
The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: revere God and keep His commandments. For this applies to all mankind.

This verse, which you can see repeats verse 13, ends this biblical book that for a full twelve chapters counsels the reader that all human endeavor is vanity and worthless striving, and that there is ultimately no difference between humans and beasts. In the end we all will go to the same place: our deaths. Some Bible scholars assert that this verse was placed at the end of the book as a kind of pious conceit. The author or editor of the book knew that his ideas were threatening to his audience, so he pitched the book as a story about a man named Kohelet whose ideas were depressing and cynical. At the end of the book, the narrator comes back to tell us: “Whatever Kohelet said about life, in the end what really matters is for you to be a good person who does what God wants.” In this way, the author is able to distance himself from the same ideas he is trying to teach by placing them in Kohelet’s mouth and allowing the narrator to end the book on a note of simple, traditional faith.

Let me suggest that this ending of Kohelet can be understood in another way, as more than an appeal to simple piety. Having considered all of Kohelet’s tortured ruminations about the purposelessness and injustice of life, the narrator sits back and tells us the following: in the end, all of Kohelet’s ruminating might be very enlightening, but taken to excess it is paralyzing. Yes, life often is meaningless and cruel, yes, we humans are no different in some respects from all other animals with whom we share mortality. However, dwelling on these truths for too long doesn’t bring us any resolution, it just causes us to waste time that we could be using to make the best we can of the lives that we have. Moreover, while it sure would be nice for everyone to just love one another in the manner suggested by the Beatles, this is not going to happen because love is a fickle emotion that does not always translate into good behavior. In those moments when love is absent, fear God by doing what God wants and needs us to do to be menschen, decent human beings. In those moments when you don’t feel loving or loved, you still have to treat yourself and others properly because that is what it means to be created in God’s image.

This truth applies to all mankind.

BREATHING BALLOONS, BECOMING AND BEING.

Dvar Torah For Parshat Breishit, 5773.

Balloons are one of the most fun and instructive of educational tools that I like to use. To elucidate one important teaching from the Torah this morning, permit me to blow up this balloon…. Obviously, were I to tie the end of this balloon, you and I could bounce it around and marvel at its lightness and liveliness until it ran out of air. With Helium inside, our lowly balloon could soar into the air effortlessly. Now, watch as I let go of the opening…. Obviously, balloons deflate when their air or Helium is let out, and they return to being mere pieces of cheap synthetic rubber or plastic.

Now, let’s take our balloon analogy one step further. I invite you, if you would like, to close your eyes for just one moment…For the briefest moment, pay attention to your breathing, the simplest, most miraculous thing that healthy human beings do reflexively every few seconds…Inhale and feel your lungs inflating, filling with air….Exhale and feel your lungs deflating, being emptied of air…At their simplest physiological levels, we and our lungs appear to be no different from balloons… But that is where the comparison ends…The air that we breathe is energy that feeds every last atom of our intricate, miraculous bodies and minds…The carbon dioxide that we exhale is the end result of processes too complex and too numerous to even try to describe…Best of all, we don’t deflate into lifeless, cheap balloons…For the duration of our lives, we continue to breathe, to live…Our breath is energy, divine in origin, human in execution…Our breath is the breath of God.

This idea that our breath is a miraculous wonder whose source is God’s breath is found in the second version of the story of the creation of human beings, which we read in our Torah portion. According to the Torah, (Genesis 2:7), “The Lord, God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living thing.” In crass, popular consciousness, this verse may evoke scenes of rabbis creating Golems or scientists creating Frankenstein beings, but in classic religious writings it is a touchstone for talking about the miracle of life and the uniqueness of human consciousness. The Targumim, the two ancient Aramaic translations of the Torah, interpret the words, “living thing” to refer to humankind’s unique ability to speak; Rashi explains this verse to mean that God created human beings with physical characteristics from the earth and with divine characteristics, particularly the ability to think; Nachmanides waxes eloquent and at length about the utter uniqueness of humankind in having been brought to life directly through the efforts of God, who directly breathed divine breath or life force into that first human. Later commentators on specific early morning prayers that emphasize the miracle of the body and the soul, allude to this verse when they write at length about the amazing nature of our bodies that manage to hold our spiritual essence –represented by God’s breath – inside of us through the duration of our lives; several commentators explore the complex, dual nature of humankind in that we share overt characteristics with all other animals here below on earth, while we are also heleq Eloah mi-maal: an enduring part of God above.

It is not clear if the traditional commentators on this verse of the Torah believed that God literally breathed enlivening energy into us at the beginning of time, and that each of our breaths is literally God’s breath flowing in and out of us. What is clear to me is that one need not take this verse’s claim literally at all in order to take it very seriously. This one verse and its interpreters represent the Bible’s and Judaism’s worldview and values at their best. They teach us that to be human is to be a daily miracle: we live and breath, actions that are so reflexive we do not need to think about them at all; yet not to think about them at all also puts us in the dangerous position of forgetting how miraculous being alive really is, and how critical preserving and respecting life truly is. This verse and its commentators also reflect brilliantly upon how complicated it is to be human. We are animals, not angels: we have animal needs, animal impulses, we live and die like all other animals. Yet, we are so much more than animals: we use speech, a trait that according to many anthropologists is the most important thing distinguishing us from all other species, and that has allowed to evolve in the way that we did; we possess consciousness and the capacity for moral choice that present us with challenges and glories no other animal could contemplate; we come as close to being divine as we can without actually being God;. Finally, this verse and its commentators constantly warn us that, no matter how special the human species is, we are not the center of the world, for we are not the Creators of ourselves, God is. In his comment on how God formed the first person from the earth, Rashi quotes an ancient teaching that God took earth from every part of Planet Earth because it is the medium in which we are buried after we die; but earth was also the material used to build the holy altar of the Jerusalem Temple, upon which offerings would be made to ask God’s forgiveness for human sin. Rashi is saying here that we human beings come from and return to the greatest symbol of our mortality and our humility. We will not live forever, and hopefully we learn over time that we are not the center of the universe, only the God of eternal life is.

This mortal life of ours at times looks, feels and maybe even is as fragile as the filling up and deflation of a balloon. That is worth our humble consideration when we lose perspective and allow the all-too-human capacity for arrogance to dominate us. However, this wonderful life of ours is also a precious creation of God whose own spirit resides in us, animates us, and propels us forward to do the incredible things that humans do best. Yes, we share much with all other species, but we are also profoundly different, in the most miraculous ways, from our most complex thoughts and actions, to our simplest breaths. This is why Jewish tradition teaches us to awaken each morning with simcha atzuma, literally “gigantic joy”, and express our deepest gratitude for simply being alive at that very moment. It is why we celebrate the birth and naming of baby or the wedding of two people who love one another: they are opportunities for us to stop rushing through this miraculous life relentlessly, so that we can look at and add to the rich tapestry of experience love that all began with that first breath of God which awakened our ancestors and began this great narrative we call being human.

HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY JERUSALEM

Dvar Torah For Parshat Ki Tavo/Shabbat of Selichot 5772.

There is something about dreaming that helps me to see the truth in ways I can’t see when I’m awake. Take the dream I had the other night. I woke up at about 4 AM after trying several hours before to write this sermon. I sat in somewhat of a stupor, not having slept sufficiently, and looked over some of the commentaries to this week’s Torah portion. At about 4:50 my body told me, “Dan, this is ridiculous, go back to sleep, even if only for an hour before you get up again to go to morning services.”

I did just that, and I had one of those dreams you have just before sunrise, that possess deep clarity and allow you to awaken feeling a bit wiser and more refreshed, even as they convey a world of conflated fantasy and real-life images. In the dream, I am riding down two main streets in Jerusalem on a rainy day just before the holiday of Purim, when everyone is out selling masks and costumes and the whole world feels like a masquerade ball. I feel like I have felt when encountering this scene in real life: a sense of bursting emotion and pride that the Jewish state is a place where we Jews can just live as naturally and openly as we wish. Suddenly the dream scene changes, and I am on a hill overlooking the old city with the Dome of The Rock prominently showing in the foreground, along with the Western Wall. The scene is clearly part of a dream sequence because next to the Temple Mount where these sites are, stands an elaborate palace that does not exists in the real Jerusalem. It shimmers with a deep maroon color, even on that cloudy, rainy day. Next to me stands an older man and a teenage boy. I am overcome with emotion…then the dream ends.

Psychology teaches that dreams allow us to confront fantasies and unresolved issues pushed down into our subconscious minds. They generally weave together emotional responses to real life experiences using images that are not real in the objective sense, but whose symbolism touches upon very real things with which we struggle. Thinking back over the last two weeks, I realize that my dream may well have been my mind’s way of dealing with a few things, obviously having to do with Jerusalem and Israel, that I have been too busy, or too afraid, to deal with. First, about two weeks ago, a woman by the name of Penina Ha-Levy died at the age of 92. She and her husband, Avraham (whom everyone referred to simply as Halevy) were my kibbutz parents when I spent the summer on their kibbutz, Hatzor-Ashdod, in the summer of 1979. They both have had a tremendous impact on me well into these, my middle years. I realize that I have been grieving their deaths, and I’ve also been feeling some guilt at not having kept in touch with them over the years. Around the same time as Penina passed away, I read the news reports about the group of young Israeli teens who attacked and severely beat four Palestinians in downtown Jerusalem while a crowd of people looked on and did nothing. Some Jewish leaders explained that this vicious, racist act was an anomaly in a generally democratic, peaceful Israeli society; others warned that it was a sign of the growing tolerance for racism and extremism in Israel. Finally, the night of my dream, earlier in the evening, I was privileged to attend a Sheva Brakhot for a young couple in the community who had just been married. Sheva Brakhot, which means in Hebrew, “seven blessings” is a week-long party after a Jewish wedding, in which the couple is hosted for a daily or nightly meal, at which the traditional seven blessings of the wedding ceremony are chanted after Birkat Ha Mazon, grace after meals. At the meal for the young couple, I was honored to publicly chant the fourth blessing, whose words are the following:

Bring great happiness and joy to mother Zion who was barren, as her children return to her in joy. Blessed are You Lord, Who gladdens Zion through her children.

The blessing places the joy we feel at the creation of a new Jewish family in the context of the rebuilding of Zion, one of the symbolic names for Jerusalem, Israel and the Jewish people. Youngest to oldest, we are Zion’s children.

Reflecting upon these experiences I had and the images in my vivid dream, I have concluded that deep down I am struggling with what traditional sources call the conflict between the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem. The heavenly Jerusalem is the one of our fantasies, in which everything is beautiful and emotionally sustaining, and the city is a place that shines with the light of the messianic age, full of peace and joy. The earthly Jerusalem is beautiful too, but like all cities in all real societies in the world, even democratic ones, it is less-than-perfect, it is at times the site of human ugliness and violence, and its light is often mixed with darkness. Penina and Avraham Halevy understood this better than anyone. Their families immigrated to America, where they both became passionate left wing, secular Zionists, then made aliyah before the founding of the State of Israel, even as their extended family was being murdered by the Nazis. The Halevys raised at least three generations of their family on their kibbutz. As they and their descendants fought physically and politically for the survival of the State of Israel, they also taught their family and others about the supreme importance of keeping Israel democratic, and actively pursuing peace with the Palestinians well before it was fashionable for anyone to even mention such things. They taught me to love Israel, yet more important to love the Jewish people in all of its complexity. Most of all, they taught me that a State of Israel that mistreats its weakest members may feel strong in the short run, but will become weak in the future, because it is not being true to its best Jewish and democratic values. Remember that these were people who lived and died as Israeli citizens and soldiers, who built the Jewish state with their own hands. They were part of an almost deceased generations of halutzim, pioneers, who pursued the dream of heavenly Jerusalem, who slogged through the dark waters of earthly Jerusalem, who spilled their own blood so that you and I could have a Jerusalem to visit, and who would have been appalled by the bloodshed perpetrated upon innocent people by their fellow Jews in the city of Jerusalem. In their own very secular way, the Halevys understood better than any of us what that blessing of Sheva Brakhot means when it talks about Zion’s children returning to her in joy. They just weren’t willing to accept the either/or notion that our Jewish people’s joy at returning to Zion has to preclude the joy of others who are living there alongside us, and vice versa, something that plenty of Palestinians still don’t get as well.

This summer, responding to people in our community on the left and the right who have asked me to speak out more on Israeli politics, I started writing a long essay about my views. After two weeks, I realized I was writing a boring, cagey, defensive manifesto that no one would read, even though it would still make everyone angry. I stopped writing it, thankfully, and I now see that this sermon is what I was intended to write instead. I am not the Jerusalem Post or Haaretz, and I do not have a PhD. in Israeli and Middle East Affairs. I would never, never presume that even my best insights about how Israel ought to deal with Iran, the Palestinians, or its own democracy and religious life are definitive truth. I do not pay Israeli taxes, I do not serve in the Israeli army, and my family is safely ensconced in Albany, NY. What some might assume is my cowardice or political cageyness in not expressing my political views is actually more a matter of humility on my part, at least I would like to believe that. I am not an AIPAC rabbi or a JSTREET rabbi, I am just one rabbi, one Jew living in America, but deeply connected emotionally and morally to the state of Israel and the Jewish people. I am tired of the political correctness police telling me that Israel is an apartheid state. That is like telling me that because America still struggles with its racist past, ipso facto, America must be an apartheid state as well. I do not see any of those same people who are so smug about demonizing Israel leaving America because it still deals inadequately with racism. I do not see them divesting themselves of their iphones or laptops, even though China, the world’s biggest producer of these items, is also the world’s biggest human rights violator. At the same time, precisely because I am a student of the Torah and of people like the Halevys, I get worried when I witness the earthly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem diverging. But forget about my worries, for in the end they lack a certain credibility since I am not an Israeli. Think about what Penina and Avraham – two people who not only dreamed but lived and loved the real Jewish state – would have worried about. Think about what they would have told us we need to do to support Israel physically, while also helping Israel democratically, Jewishly and spiritually. Would their emphasis on security and using military might to protect the Jewish people have made them right wingers? No. Would their emphasis on peace and justice for all of Israel’s citizens have made them left wingers? No. It would have made them, it did make them, Jews and Zionists in the best senses of those words.

I grieve the loss of my friends and mentors, the Halevys. I continue to dream and try to make reality the things they taught me. I rejoice at the rebuilding of Zion each time a Jewish couple marries, each time anyone goes to Israel and comes back transformed. I pray that Israel continue on its path of being a strong, Jewish and democratic state. I am hopeful that these dreams of mine will continue to become reality. I make a commitment in this coming new year to doing my part to make those dreams come true.

YOU, GOD, WHO LIVE NEXT DOOR...

Dvar Torah For Parshat Va-Etchanan, 5772.

Listen to this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, the 19th century Austrian-Czech writer whose Book Of Hours is a classic of contemporary spiritual poetry.

You, God, Who live next door—
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking—
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why wouldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,

it would barely make a sound.

Who is this God that Rilke addresses? Certainly not the God that popular religious culture has trained many of us to believe in. That God, meaning that description of God, figures the Holy One as so distant, frightening, mysterious, impenetrably Other, that we could never imagine Him as anything other than Melekh Ha-Olam, the imperious Ruler of the universe. Certainly, our experience of life’s awesome mysteries, as well as our mortal smallness before Nature and Time can humble us sufficiently to understand and relate to God in this way, even when our exercise of human prowess makes us arrogant. Who is the God that Rilke is speaking to? Imagine yourself awake in the lonely night listening so intently for your parent, your child, your good friend sleeping right next door to you, just beyond the paper-thin walls separating the two of you. You can barely hear him or her breathing, you have no way of knowing how he or she is doing, or even if your loved one is alive! You are so paper-thin-walls close to each other, but even that distance is achingly far. So too, Rilke tells us, is his relationship with God. Rilke’s God is potentially vulnerable, even needy, and Rilke wants so badly to knock down those walls separating them because God needs him. Sometimes, God’s need for him – for any person – is deeply reflected in even the most mundane tasks of helping other people, symbolized by getting someone a glass of water in the middle of the night. Rilke listens for any sound God would make in the world, the sound of God calling for help.

In case you think that this way of talking to and about God is scandalously un-Jewish, think again. Though images of God as the all-powerful and all-knowing King abound in Jewish tradition, the idea of God as being in need or in search of Man, as Abraham Heschel put it, finds expression particularly in rabbinic and later mystical literature. Think of God as the divine father who suffers when His children suffer, of Shekhinah, the up-close-and-personal face of God who goes into exile when the children of Israel are exiled, and of the God of the Kabbalah Who cannot heal Herself or the world without human intervention. All of these striking images are a part of Jewish tradition, and all of them point to a critical role for us human beings in God’s life and in life itself.

Though the following is admittedly a highly creative interpretation, I want to suggest that our reading of the majestic first line of the Shma is pointing us to the same kind of relationship with our vulnerable God to which Rilke alludes. We just read the first paragraph of the Shma in its original setting, our Torah portion. In context, the Shma is Moses’ stunning charge to the Israelites to affirm God’s oneness and to love God with absolute finality and exclusivity.

Shma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ekhad.
Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Little wonder that this line is recited twice a day by Jews, why it is the subject of so much roiling theological debate, why it is one of the first prayers that a Jew learns in infancy, and why it is the last thing we say before our deaths. Essentially, its assertion that God is our God and the God of the universe, that God is the absolute Oneness underlying all of existence, is what Judaism is all about: the ultimate protest against all idolatry, the ultimate faith statement that all existence is one. That is tremendous.

However, look at a number of things that are so strange about this first line of the Shma. Why does Moses tell us to listen to a statement of faith? Normally, when the Bible asks us to listen or to hear, it is asking us to pay attention to instructions or commands. Why does God’s name Adonai, spelled YHVH, get repeated? Grammatically, it would have been more logical to say simply, Adonai Eloheinu Ekhad: the Lord our God is one. Why this superfluous phrase, the Lord (is) our God? What is the deeper meaning of Yisrael, the name Israel, and does Ekhad only mean that God is One?

Using Rilke’s imagery and that of Jewish tradition before him, I suggest that Moses’ charge could be read quite differently. To this point, God has staked so much on the viability of the covenant with the Jewish people, a covenant upon which God relies to bring testimony of God’s presence and power into the world. We, the people of Israel need God as we are about to enter the promised land, but God needs us just as much. A well known Talmudic comment (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Brakhot 6b) elucidates this mutuality in a rather shocking way. After playfully “proving” that, like us, God also wears Tefillin, the black prayer boxes containing the Shma that are worn on weekdays in prayer, the Talmud then teaches that a passage praising the Jewish people’s uniqueness to God is written in God’s Tefillin as well! Our Tefillin remind us that God is the only One for us: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” God’s Tefillin remind God that we are the only ones for Him: “Who is like Your people, Israel, a unique nation on earth!” The Talmud then imagines God telling us Jews: “Look, you singled Me out for love and attention among everything in the world; what is written in your Tefillin is evidence of this. So too, I single you out for love and attention among everything in the world with what is written in My Tefillin.” Implicit in this highly imaginative story is mutual love and need between us and God, a two way street of interdependence.
With this Talmudic story and Rilke in mind, how might we read this first line of the Shma differently? Let me offer my own translation:

Yisrael, you who are always struggling with God and men: listen closely for Adonai our God Who is right next door to us in love and intimacy. That same Adonai is alone and lonely.

Let me quickly break down each part of my translation.

Shma, the command form of the Hebrew verb SHAMAH, to hear, is often employed to mean heed instruction or orders. I understand it in its most literal sense: to listen intently to or for something, as when Rilke tells God, “I wait listening, always.”

Yisrael, the biblical name for the Jewish people, is taken from our patriarch, Jacob’s new name that was given to him by God’s messenger after their tumultuous struggle prior to Jacob being reunited with his estranged brother, Esau. Like our ancestor, we are a people constantly struggling with the divine and the human, and like him we prevail.

Adonai is Eloheinu. We are asked from time to time to desist from our Yisrael struggles long enough to listen closely, carefully, compassionately for God with Whom we have such intimacy, yet Who feels at times so detached and isolated from us.

Adonai is Ekhad: not One in some abstract philosophical sense of pure unity of being, but One in the sense of being alone, lonely, and isolated.

In other words, with this first line of the Shma, Moses might really be calling us to reach out to God, Who is often very alone in the struggle to be a presence in the world, Who feels close enough to be our next door neighbor, yet from Whom we feel at times alienated. So much evil and despair in the world push us and God apart, as if our distance were the difference between heaven and earth. This is terrible for God and even worse for us. The Shma inspires us, commands us, to knock on God’s door with the greatest urgency and to let God know that God may be One in a way that is beyond us, but with us as God’s partners, God is never alone.