Seventy two years later, when Omaha and other Normandy
beaches are quiet, destinations for tourism and holidays, Islamic
fundamentalism spreads into Europe, enormous waves of refugees fleeing violence
in the Middle East seek to enter.
On our own shores, the plague of gun violence, and other
violence whether through hate speech or physical violence at presidential
campaign events, continues to wreak havoc on our schools, on our families. The recent shootings in Minnesota and then
UCLA highlight how persistent the problems are and how challenging it seems to
be to put an end to it, how to balance the freedoms and protections of the
Constitution and the value of life without upending democracy.
In Israel, violence persists as well, and for the first time
in recent memory I have heard from people who recently traveled there, people
who otherwise would walk briskly and confidently down the streets, that they
were more on edge and suspicious of the unkown.
Why is it that our places of greatest triumph are also
places of great tragedy?
When we’ve reached such great heights of unity against evil,
of creating a representative democracy out of British colonies, of creating a
modern Jewish State out of a dusty desert, that we then confront such great
challenges, challenges that threaten to upend the amazing and courageous work
of previous generations to lay the foundations of the way of life we live and
hope to teach to our students and children?
The same is true for Mount Sinai. As we complete reading from Sefer Vayikra,
the Book of Leviticus, today, we acknowledge we’ve been at Sinai for a long
time. Since we arrive there following the
Exodus, we’ve been encamped for some 2 years and at Sinai we receive the Torah,
we experience our greatest moment of unity and aspiration, the moment we will
celebrate at Shavuot in one week, and also one of our most infamous moments,
creating the Golden Calf, Egel Ha’Zahav.
Just as God prepares to give us the guidance we will need not only for
the wilderness but for the rest of our future, we turn away, and the people
violate what will be the first and second commandments right at the foot of the
Holy Mountain.
The Book of Leviticus ends by reminding us of the Holy
Mountain, “These are the mitzvot that God gave Moses for the Israelite people
on Mount Sinai.”(27:34) This sounds like
a throw away, a postscript, a reminder that just in case we’ve forgotten as we
listen to the Torah chanting, we’ve been at Sinai and we’ve heard all God has had
to say. This moment is over, and it’s
time to move on.
Before we move on though, the Torah reminds us in this
innocuous sounding end to the Book, when we might expect something more
majestic, that D-Day, Pushing back against violence here and abroad, and
maintaining a Jewish democratic state in the middle east are vital goals but
the process of doing so is painful, painstaking and gradual, and tragically
beyond the lifetime of any single one of us.
And so the great Rabenu Bachya, from Spain, teaches us to
read this last sentence through a different lens, the lens of looking into the
future, into the unknown. When the Torah
says, “These are the mitzvot,” “Eleh ha’mitzvot” Bachya explains, “The word Eleh, these are,
means the mitzvot are eternal, they will be forever.”
Bachya gives us a new lens, the lens of accepting the
rabbinic wisdom kol hat’cha’lot kashot, all beginnings are difficult, and then
challenging us to hold fast to faith when triumph turns into tragedy, when
tragedy can often stay around too long, when maintaining the whole comes into
conflict with healing a part, when we lose hope, when we question the
structures that gave us security and reliability and feel our humanity our
finite-ness more than we care to feel it.
Bachya’s reading here, a reading shared by many others,
should remind us of how difficult it is to build something, anything, to
maintain it, to grow it, to nurture its passion and energy so that overtime an
idea, an organization, a person, a family, a nation dos not grow into a fixed
rhythm it cannot break, into patterns that while familiar and comforting, do
not open up opportunities for self-reflection.
And the same occurs in Jewish communities, even in
traditional ones. Of late, we’ve seen
out of the Orthodox, that is the Orthodox Jewish world, strong statements of a
necessity to step back from accepted norms to make sure that Jews do mitzvot
with the correct kavannah, intention, and in the most thoughtful and humane
way. Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo has
written about taking off his kippah in order to remember why he wears it. Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz has written about
‘swearing off’ kosher meat altogether and turning vegetarian due to disturbing
news about conditions in some kosher slaughterhouses. The Modern Orthodox world has been struggling
mightily with the movement in our area and others to confer official Jewish
leadership status to women. Some in the
Orthodox world have even endeavored through significant controversy to find a
way to permit Shabbat observant Jews to text on Shabbat. All these things have come up even as the
same Jews in these communities continue, as we do, to honor Shabbat and
holidays, to study the Torah of ethics, the Torah of tradition, and the Torah
of keeping alive a thousands year old tradition in the face of earth shattering
change.
Suffice to say, for our own community, if those to the right
of us can struggle mightily and think creatively about their future, then so
can we. We here, like the soldiers on
Omaha beach, struggle to keep the fire of faith burning here in our own
community even as we confront a world that tends to tell us to swear off of
faith and focus on other things that seem to be more important at the moment.
Triumph and tragedy happen hand in hand, just as the Rabbis
say ‘life and death are in our mouths’ as far as what we say to one another,
just as the Rabbis teach us that all beginnings are difficult.
First though imagine the person you want to be, the family
we want to have, the country we wish for, the Israel we pray for, get that
vision and picture so clear in mind that it’s almost real and may the ruach the
spirit of this Shabbat lift us up under our wings so that we can make that
vision real, through triumph, and tragedy.
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