2005 Rosh Hashanah Sermon
Practicing Jews
I’ve been told often that the words spoken from this Bimah on these High Holidays are not words one would be likely to hear from the Bimah of a conventional synagogue. My response always is a reminder that BAJC is not a very conventional synagogue, but then that Vermont also is not a very conventional state, and that the people who live here hardly meet anyone’s conventions. So I once again ask for patience and understanding as I offer these words, and that, in listening, you abide by our guiding principle, namely that, in listening to a sermon, no one is allowed to quit the synagogue in a huff, but there’s no limit on the number who may join.
During the past four years in Brattleboro , I have officiated a large number of baby namings, brit milahs, weddings, and funerals, and have been together with many persons wishing to say Kaddish for deceased loved ones. Many of these events have been with those of you I see often. But many others have been with those of you who are not formally associated with this congregation, people I otherwise see primarily on these High Holidays.
I find it interesting that when many of you contact me for such a life cycle event, you add the words, somewhere in the conversation, and with just the slightest tinge of guilt, “I’m not a practicing Jew,” meaning perhaps “I don’t attend synagogue very often, I don’t keep all of the commandments – sometimes with just a hint of “I’m not a very good Jew,” or maybe even “I’m a kind of second class Jew.”
Then, in many cases, indeed most case, as I get to know you a little better, I learn about the rachmones or the tzedakah, the acts of compassion and of justice you are carrying out in your life for those in need. I learn about the nourishing of the spirit that you find in God’s creation that manifests itself most magnificently here in Vermont . And I learn of the emotional connection you feel with the Jewish people.
This has led me to reflect on that term “practicing Jew.” What does it mean to “practice” Judaism? And, in turn, what is this Judaism that is to be practiced? Seems like a question worth thinking about on these Holiest of Days.
Surely to some, the Judaism to be practiced is clear. It means piety and adherence to the mitzvot – all 613 of them in the Torah. Yet to the prophets, and most particularly to Isaiah in the Yom Kippur haftarah we will read next week, what God most wants from us is not ritual piety, sackcloth and ashes but rather the feeding of the hungry and the clothing of the naked. Do this, we are told, and our sun will rise as the noonday In the same vein, the great Hillel, when asked to provide the essence of the Torah while standing on one foot did not speak about ritual piety, but said rather, “Love thy neighbor as thyself…all the rest is commentary.”
This same question about the essence of the Judaism to be practiced was at the core of the agenda when Reform Judaism was established in Germany in the early 19 th century and later in this country. While some of that agenda related to Jewish efforts at political and social acceptance and to the creation of a modern, intellectually respectable form of Judaism, the agenda also involved searching for the core meaning of our religion. Indeed that very searching was to become the essence of Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism which teach us that the meaningful and the evocative in Judaism don’t have to be ritual-centered but can also be accessed through social justice, through education, through community, and even through a spirituality that may have relatively little to do with religious ritual.
I also found myself thinking about our grandparents and great grandparents in Europe . Many of them fell into one of three categories according to their primary passion: religious observance, Zionism or socialism, the last of these also a synonym for social action. In retrospect, I asked myself, weren’t all three of these golden threads essential in producing the Judaism we cherish today?
Given all of this, you can perhaps understand my questioning of this term “practicing Jew” as it is normally used – to mean, rather narrowly: attending synagogue services, keeping kosher, strictly observing the Sabbath.
Let me be perfectly clear here. I love Jewish worship and I love the way we worship together in this congregation. Give me five minutes and I will regale you with stories about our worship and about our BAJC community and the sense of belonging that comes from being part of such a caring community that connects us strongly with our heritage. I derive great sustenance from our worship. One of my great delights is in sharing this passion with the youth of our congregation and in our adult education classes. I also find many of the mitzvot, many of our rituals deeply compelling and want to be observing more rather than less as I get older. When we practice an ancient tradition such as those carried out by a chevra kadisha at the time of death, I am deeply moved. I love the idea that these traditions should be passed through the generations. What makes me uncomfortable is not these traditions, but rather the conviction that prayer and ritual observance are the only means of accessing the wonders, the riches of Judaism, that a “practicing Jew” as the term is normally used, is a higher form of being, is a better Jew.
Judaism, in fact, is a wonderfully rich tapestry into which is woven the worlds not only of Maimonides but also of Theodore Hertzl, a man who couldn’t stand to set foot in a synagogue; a tapestry which includes the worlds of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Baruch Spinoza and Henrietta Szold and Channah Senish and Ann Frank and Leon Trotsky, and Marc Chagall, and Benny Goodman and Hank Greenberg and blintzes and kugel and Purim costumes and Yiddish theater. I would not like to think that any single group has a corner on Judaism - - we’re just a whole lot broader and more interesting and more complex than that.
This is heading, you won’t be surprised, toward a recommendation for these High Holidays. But before we go there, let me insert a parenthesis, but an important one, that has occupied my thoughts in recent years.
Why shouldn’t Jewish piety and Jewish hunger for justice go together? Shouldn’t they really? Shouldn’t piety, shouldn’t the careful study of Torah and the books of the prophets with their insistence on justice lead to a passionate insistence on justice by the pious? Here I have too often been disappointed. In my study of American Jewish history, and the difficulties we, like most immigrant peoples, experienced in this new land, I looked again and again for the voices of the pious to protest as Isaiah would have protested, to take a stand as Jeremiah would have done. When I read of Jewish immigrant girls fresh off the ships from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century being whisked off by Jewish pimps, when I studied about the communities which were endangered by Jewish gangsters, when I learned of the fictitious Jewish congregations which were created during Prohibition in order to permit the transport and sale of “sacramental wine,” I looked carefully for the voices of the observant orthodox – and didn’t find them. It was rather courageous journalists and Reform rabbis who blew the whistle on each of these abuses. The same, of course, was the case in the more recent struggles for equal rights being waged by African Americans and by women in this country.
I continue to search for such voices of justice. When the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem met with the leading imams and Christian patriarchs of that city last winter, a rare interfaith gathering indeed, I thought I had found it. How wonderful that these leading clerics of often contentious peoples in this most contested of cities would be meeting together! But what was, in fact, the purpose of their meeting? They were meeting to figure out ways to block a Gay Pride parade being planned in the city. As a descendent of many generations of Orthodox rabbis, I continue to ask myself, why it is that my Orthodox sisters and brothers so often get right what’s on the right side of the decimal point in terms of ritual observance, yet get wrong the big issues of justice and morality on the left side of that decimal point.
I worry also that when my orthodox brothers and sisters do take a stand, they do so in ways not dissimilar from the Christian Evangelical right, and not just in political positions and voting records. Among our orthodox brothers and sisters as among fundamentalists of other faiths there is that all too frequent sense of certainty that they are on God’s side and the rest of us are not. That’s not the stuff of openness. That’s not the stuff of interfaith dialogue. It makes me very sad.
It often seems to me that the greatest religious conflict in the world today is not between Jews and Muslims, or between Christians and Muslims, or between Christians and Jews, or between Hindus and Muslims, but rather between those people who believe that God can be found in all of these religions, and those who believe God can be found exclusively in their own religion.
I have, however, not given up. As I indicated at Adam Finck’s Bar Mitzvah in June, there are new and promising developments taking place in the Modern Orthodox movement – the creation of a Yeshiva more broad-based than any so far established, and the ordination of the first Orthodox woman rabbi. Although she won’t be accepted by many, the important thing is that she will be accepted by some. The total Orthodox population in this country is substantially younger than the American Jewish population as a whole. Some of these young people, I want to believe, are going to be serious also about morality on the left side of the decimal point.
End of parenthesis.
So what to do about the term “practicing Jew?” One possibility is that we expunge it from our vocabulary, that we label it as a remnant of a more parochial Judaism against which many of us actively rebelled, a patriarchal religion, a religion that thrived on the distribution of guilt, a religion of narrow definitions and limited participation, a religion, in fact, that has led most Jews in Israel itself to become secular Jews, a religion that led Saul Bellow – a writer who often participated in our High Holiday services and who is buried in our cemetery - to write, and I quote, “America offered to free us from the control of the Jewish community.” One possibility is that we label the term “practicing Jew” as one more attempt to impose hierarchy within our religion. We might argue that we have had more than enough hierarchy in Judaism over the centuries, and that perpetuating hierarchy based solely on worship and ritual is not what we as a people need to be doing in the 21 st century.
My preference, however, is that we redefine the term, and then proceed to define ourselves in. If we have enough of an emotional tie to our people to want to have a Jewish funeral for a parent and say Kaddish for that parent and we work at the Drop In Center or Morningside Shelter, let’s define ourselves in. If we have enough of an emotional tie to our people that we want to have a Jewish wedding and give Hebrew names to our children and teach them about our heritage, and we spend Shabbat walking with our children through the forests of Vermont – arguably God’s most wondrous creation – let’s define ourselves in. If we have enough of an emotional tie to our people that we want to have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah for our child, and we are working to bring an end to bloodshed in Iraq or the Middle East or Darfur, let’s define ourselves in. If in our hearts, after all that our people have endured, we consider ourselves Jewish, and we are proud to say so, let’s define ourselves in.
If we do so, Judaism will be that much the richer, and we might find our lives richer as well.
Let me make all of this yet more concrete by providing a very specific example. During the course of his illness I spoke frequently with Marty Jezer. I often spoke of Marty as my rabbi, as my mentor. Every time I spoke with Marty I learned something new. Every time I picked up the weekend Reformer and read Marty’s column, I learned something new. Marty didn’t join us often in this space, but he had deep emotional ties to his Judaism, ties that connected that Judaism to the moral issues of today. Marty, in fact, grew up assuming that that the Passover story was as much about the African-American struggle for justice in America as it was about the Jews’ fight for freedom in Egypt – and he wrote compellingly about the connection. And when he wrote or spoke about the struggle against homophobia or about the empowerment of traditionally marginalized populations or handicapped individuals, or spent Sabbath afternoons sitting with and helping children self conscious about their stuttering, the energy behind his passion stemmed from the ethical base of his Judaism as he learned it from his parents and grandparents.
Marty wrestled constantly with the meaning of Judaism in his life. And he would have been the first to agree that this wrestling with our inner selves, is anything but easy. Understanding our particular Jewish identity, and understanding it well enough to be able to pass this heritage on to our children and our grandchildren is anything but easy. It involves taking seriously not only our heritage, not only those Jewish rituals we find meaningful and evocative, but also taking seriously the moral imperatives of our faith, including that most important imperative of Tikkun Olam – of healing the world. Our grandparents used to say in Yiddish, “Shvertze zein a Yid,” it’s not easy to be a Jew. And they were right. All of this is hard work. And, in these struggles, we are here when you need us.
In fact this, I personally believe, is the very best argument for becoming part of a Jewish community – so that we won’t have to engage in this struggle alone, so that we will be in the company of others who also take these challenges seriously.
So what have we said here? That none of us are second class Jews; that moral action on the left side of the decimal point trumps ritual practice on the right side; that the two ought to go together more frequently than they do; that rather than expunging the term “practicing Jew” we ought to redefine it; that none of this promises to be easy; and given that, that we’re here when you need us.
But, of course, there’s still more to Judaism – there also are the moments that light our lives. Philip Roth captures such a moment well when we writes about his mother – and how many of our mothers - who ritually and touchingly lit the Shabbat candles with the devotional delicacy she’d absorbed as a child from watching her own mother, and then hugged the children. There was a glow in all who were in the room. We know the scene well and, like Roth, we cling to it. It connects us with generations past and with generations to come. It brings us close to our very essence, and to our inner selves, and to our best selves and to God. And, let there be no doubt, this also is practicing Judaism.
Amen
Jim Levinson
Brattleboro Area Jewish Community
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