Parshat Shoftim - What is justice? - 15th year after September 11, 2001

When I was 8 years old I had the chance to visit Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, Prinsengracht, number 263.  In light of this season of remembering September the 11^th, I want to share some well-known words Anne Frank wrote in her diary.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Anne Frank’s immortal words ask us to have faith that ‘peace and tranquility’ will return again.

She does not though ask, at least in this passage, for justice.

She does not seek the destruction of the enemy, or tribunals.  She simply holds fast to a faith that the world will restore itself, that hate will transform to love, that cruelty will transform to gentleness. 

Sadly this vision is not yet realized.  15 years after September 11, 2001 we continue to mourn the murder of 3,000 people, the tragic loss of so many first responders, and the sickness and death of many who worked at the site in lower Manhattan and contracted diseases as a result.

Much of the past 15 years has been a search for justice and search for rebuilding. 

But what act of justice or rebuilding can make up for even one life? 

Is there really a compensatory justice?  Or is the effort a way to prevent future attacks?

Today we take a moment to consider the pursuit of justice the past 15 years.  The United States military went into Afghanistan to pursue terrorists, searched for and took out Osama Bin Laden and others.  There is more security at airports.  For a time there was even a terrorism threat message coded by colors.

But as the Talmud teaches, a life is a world, and only God can create or recreate a world.  We can only keep memories alive, tell the story, and make sure that we not only do not forget but also teach the values of tolerance, thoughtfulness, and peaceful ways to resolve conflict.

We also look around, our country, our world, and we wonder perhaps justice is so imperfect, not in is philosophy, but in its application, that we just have to get used to the efforts of judges and courts to do their best, as we always do, and that the hope for tzedek – for justice at all levels, is something that is a striving, a hope, a goal that we work towards whether we work in the legal field or not.  It is a human striving, for creating a world that every day reflects the kind of world God hopes we can create.

Our parsha teaches us how tenuous the line be justice and injustice can be, and how we must be able to believe in the justice system first – Our ancestors, like us, were wanderers – Like us they did not always know what the road ahead would be for them, what the future would hold.  But they did not have the resources, things like DNA, photo, and video that could help establish evidence in a court room.  And so the ancient justice system was based on witness testimony, and that testimony alone could establish innocence or guilt.

Al pi shnay e’dim or shlosha edim yakum davar – a case can be valid only on the testimony of two witnesses or more…

Fifteen years after 9/11 it’s important to ask ourselves, to ask ourselves to think like witnesses and to offer a loving and honest critique of where we’ve come to all these years after the tragedies in Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and with Flight 93 that fateful day, to look and to witness whether in that time we’ve set up our Jewish communities to provide more help and support to those in need, to cross the aisles and meet the people we don’t know and forge stronger connections, to reach out to people living nearby us – people of all backgrounds and religions and get to know them, are we creating moments when it’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable, are we praying regularly?  Not praying only for things or for people but tefillah in the sense of self-reflection, appreciation of the world and its blessings, prayers of gratitude.

Are we creating the world that Anne Frank, during one of the darkest chapters of human history, the world that she believed was possible?

Prayer for the Town of Oyster Bay 9/11 Memorial Service 2016

I am in love with Ocean

lifting her thousands of white hats

in the chop of the storm,

or lying smooth and blue, the

loveliest bed in the world.

In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,

a heart-load for each of us

on the dusty road. I suppose

there is a reason for this, so I will be

patient, acquiescent. But I will live

nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting

equally in all the blast and welcome

of her sorrowless, salt self. (Mary Oliver)

In the same spirit, the ancient poet of Psalm 93 writes about the voice of the waves that crash against the shore, Mikolot mayim rabim…that the Divine spirit of love and memory rings out above those sounds, even above the crashing sounds of breaking glass, and metal, and the sounds of horror and disbelief we remember from 15 years ago, even as if it were yesterday.

We continue to mourn with the families who lost loved ones that day, with the families of first responders – keeping our police and fire and EMS crews in our prayers as they work day and night to protect us, we mourn with the workers who contracted illness after working at the site, and pray for their healing.

And we also remind ourselves that we should not think of 9/11 as a historical event, something that happened at one time but as representative of how tragically we must still work together to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and suspicion in our world – to ensure that we can celebrate the wondrous diversity around us and how we can come together in unity to support one another.

15 years after Sep 11, 2001, let us commit to doing 15 acts of gemilut chasadim, acts of loving kindness, and may we then fulfill the teaching I share from my tradition, mizvah goreret mitzvah, that one good deed leads us to do another, until the world is overflowing with deeds of kindness and compassion like the waves that flow onto the sand.  Amen.

Why do we observe Tisha B'Av?

Rabban Gamliel, Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Akiva went to Jerusalem.  They reached the Temple that was in ruins and saw a fox emerging from the ruins of the Holy of Holies.  The others started to cry but Rabbi Akiva laughed.  They asked, “Why are you laughing Akiva?”  He replied, “It was prophesied (Book of Lamentations) that foxes would haunt the Temple Mount, and it was also prophesied that the ‘old men and women will yet dwell in the streets of Jerusalem’.  Now that the first has happened, we know the second, the redemption, will happen, too.”

They replied, “Akiva, you have consoled us, you have consoled us!”

We have an ambivalent approach to mourning the Temple.  In our Siddur, we changed the language in our Musaf service from ‘we will offer sacrifices at the Temple’ to ‘We once offered sacrifices…’ but we also kept “May the Temple be rebuilt soon and in our days.” 

We support the State of Israel as a democracy and the evolution of our faith from priesthood and offerings to prayer, tzedakah, and community building.  I suggest we’d find it strange to see rebuilding of the Temple and restoration of its rituals with the inevitable political and religious fallout from the actual rebuilding.

So why then do we observe this holiday of Tisha B’av, even granted that other national tragedies occurred on the same day in history?

Why observe this holiday that in many communities is even less familiar that Shemini Atzeret or T”u Bi’shevat?

It’s a holiday that according to writer Simon Yisrael Fuerman (Tablet Magazine) probably was familiar to many only from a classic Allan Sherman song, “Why did she go and fall in love, I haven’t seen her since last Tisha B’av.”

One way to see Tisha B’av’s relevance is as a day long Tachanun – the weekday prayers when we ‘lean in’ on God for support.  We’re soaked in tears, we’ve had too much, we’re done, we’re cooked and we can’t go on without a source of strength from outside ourselves.

There are two pieces of the Tachanun that have always spoken to me and that bear on our experience of Tisha B’Av – giving us two ways to reflect on this upcoming moment of remembering sadness, destruction, pain and loss.

The first is “We do not know what to do…” Va’anachnu lo nedah mah naseh…We search, often in the dark, for answers, what to do, how to do it, why me?  Why us?  Why now?  The 9^th of Av is a day of recognizing our humanity, recognizing we don’t have all the answers, that we’re searching, hoping, praying for inspiration – but often that light bulb just doesn’t pop up over our heads.

The second is “Remember compassion in the midst of anger” Bero’gez ra’chem tizkor…Around us there is so much anger, stress, crankiness, edginess, and impatience.  It feels like the world is on edge.  There are 7 billion, 442 million, 886 (or so) people on earth flying past each other at digital light speed, car horns blaring, lives exposed on social media more than we’d care to realize [even for those of us who are not on Facebook].  And so we ask God to remember compassion for each of us when thing don’t work out the way we hoped, when we’re lonely and lost and angry with ourselves, angry with God.  We ask God to help us be gentle, not backing down or giving up – but patience in strength and endurance.

The 9^th of Av makes the evils of the world more real to us because we choose to confront them through the lens of our lived experience, to shed tears at what we’ve lost while never forgetting how far we’ve come against all odds.

And if we find ourselves laughing like Rabbi Akiva, then let’s laugh, release the tension, notice the irony, and live with things unfinished and in disorder, at least for a day.

            

Pinchas 5776/2016: To whom will we offer a cup of water?

I was waiting for the flight home from Israel, waiting in the departures area at Ben Gurion airport.  There were hundreds of people there:  Americans, Israelis, people who looked to be religious, others, like me, with just a kippah.  A man with a bright smile, dressed in a fairly religious looking fashion, was making eye contact across the row of seats where I was sitting, and saying something to everyone in the seats.  He made eye contact with me and said, “Yehudi, atah rotzeh kos mayim?”  This translates to, “Fellow Jew!  Would you like a cup of water?”  I said, “Lo todah”, no thank you.

I don’t recall anyone ever offering me anything, checking in on me, or otherwise paying attention to me at an airport.  As in many places, people there tend to keep to themselves, checking phones, typing on the computer, snoozing, or talking to the folks sitting to their right or left.

I was thinking about this story after studying the part of parshat Pinchas we read today, the part that lays out the sacrifices our ancient brothers and sisters brought to the Temple in Jerusalem during the 7 days of Sukkot, a total of 70 sacrifices over the course of the week long festival.

And ringing in my head at the same time are the words of the prophet Hoshea (6:6), “Chesed chafatz’ti ve’lo zavach,” “For I desire loving-kindness and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

Aren’t the sacrifices meant to train us to live with self-awareness and responsibility?  We must take the initiative to acquire and participate in the offerings.  As a people we must choose to hear and respond to God’s words, and if we love God with these gifts then we will be more likely to also love God by treating other people with the respect and dignity they deserve, and also hopefully reaching out to others as the kind gentleman reached out to me.

Time and again, though, the prophets warn us our sacrifices are in vain since they noticed disrespect and injustice around them.  They say, in effect, focus on the moral principles in the Torah first, and let the ritual aspects enrich our Jewish lives through both the discipline they demand and the beauty and insight they can help us achieve.

The Torah, to be clear, does not distinguish between ritual and moral mitzvoth.  There is no scale in the Torah itself that suggests love your neighbor as yourself is any greater a value than the nation’s responsibility to furnish the 70 offerings for Sukkot.

But later authorities, prophets and Rabbis, especially after the destruction of the Temple, an event we will remember on Tisha B’av in 3 weeks; they will argue that after the destruction of the Temples, which happened despite adherence to the rituals, perhaps the mitzvoth ben adam la’chavero, the ways people should relate to one another, are in fact more important, and in fact causeless hatred – disrespect, lack of empathy – that animosity between people toppled the 2^nd Temple and not the military might of the 10^th Roman legion.

We can synthesize these reflections by first making an assumption, an assumption I hope we can all agree upon, the assumption that God gives the Torah to the people for the better – that they, that we, will benefit.  We will grow in holiness, and in taking responsibility for our behavior, for being good stewards of the world that surrounds and nourishes us, for being teachers and leaders in the tradition of our ancestors. 

And we find this assumption grows not only toward ourselves, as the people of the covenant, but to others as well.  Rashi brings down a Midrash on the opening words of the verses laying out the 70 offerings, “The [offerings] of the [Sukkot] holiday are 70 with respect to the 70 nations of the world…[in the days of the Holy Temple] they offer them protection from adversity.”(Rashi to 29:18) 

But tragically, while studying the Torah and internalizing its teachings can give us a sense of identity and purpose, neither the Torah nor its teachings can protect us from harm, from the evils the world and its people carry out.  While we participate in Jewish life, in prayer, in education, in any way we express our Judaism, and as we strive to grow as thoughtful, caring, and active in creating this world in God’s image, we operate knowing that the unknown is so much greater, and often scarier, than the known, that the shalom we seek – the peace, the wholeness, the blessing – is elusive. 

Our tradition points out and emphasizes just how elusive this peace can be in the opening verses of this week’s parsha when God promises Pinchas, the title character, a brit shalom, a covenant of peace – the ‘vav’ in that word Shalom is cut in two, there is a break in the vav showing to us how zealotry in acting for God can in fact lead to suffering rather than salvation.

We’ve seen this too often this summer, and most recently in the violent way terrorists entered the church in St. Etienne de Rouvray, in northern France, and murdered Father Jacques Hamel and left other parishioners critically injured.  The perverted zealousness of the Islamic State terrorists appears to have no boundaries and although Muslim communities in France and elsewhere denounce these attacks, they sadly continue as do protests against the State of Israel a place where its Arab citizens fare well in comparison to other countries in the region.  And we must demand during this election season that  both sides of the political spectrum here must make the campaign about real plans for thoughtful leadership.

In this three weeks period, let’s follow the example of the generous gentleman who made the offer of a glass of water.  In place of causeless hate, let us offer ahavat chinam, loving-kindness without expectation of reward or return.  While we must stand strong and take the fight to our enemies, we ourselves are not the soldiers to do this and violence in speech and action tends to only breed more of the same.  As MLK taught us, we will meet brute force with soul force.  And like the protestors of the 1960s, we will prepare and be thoughtful in our approach – like our ancient brothers and sisters we will make the sacrifice of our time and energy to reach out, to branch out, and extend our message to the community before Tisha B’av and long before we gather to usher in a New Year.

Let’s take a moment to think now, to whom will we offer the glass of water this week?

Shabbat Shalom.

Dvar Torah: Balak 5776/2016: Great Expectations

Our expectations help to define our experiences, and in the big picture, our lives.

I want to share a story that reinforces this idea -- the story of a man, who will remain nameless, a man who was living down in Florida and noticed a store front that advertised ‘$100 cruise vacation’.  What a great deal.  He walked in and asked if the offer on the storefront was real.  The clerk behind the desk said it surely was real.  The man handed over the one hundred dollars and asked when the cruise vacation would depart – the clerk said, right now if you’re ready, please step through this way.  He crossed through the main desk and as he did the clerk took a baseball bat and knocked him on the head.  When he regained consciousness, he found himself floating on the ocean, in an inner tube, floating out there in the middle of the wide ocean.  He looked around and noticed someone else floating in an inner tube – he paddled over there and called out to the other, “Hey over there, do they serve a dinner on this trip?”  The other called out, “They didn’t last year.”

This story reminds us to be wary of our assumptions and of our expectations.  What seems like a good deal at first can quickly turn out to be anything but a good deal.  It is of course ridiculous to think that a full-fledged cruise vacation could ever cost $100, but we also know from recent history that even full-priced cruises are subject to Noro Virus, engine failure, and, in the case of the Costa Concordia and others, can be even worse tragedies. 

And expectations at full-price set the stage this week when King Balak, King of Mo’av, brings out Bil’am the magician to curse the people of Israel.  Mo’av fears the Israelites will rout them as they did to the Amorites, and Balak supposes Bil’am may be able to prevent the disaster.  In our reading today, we chanted the third and final oracle Bil’am speaks regarding the Israelites, and it includes the familiar words Ma tovu ohalecha Yakov mishkenotecha Yisrael – How beautiful are your tents O, Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel. 

While later Jewish tradition paints Bilam as an evil sorcerer (kind of like Aladdin’s Jafar), and later Jewish tradition demonstrates that his words, however they sound, show evil intent, it’s pretty clear here that he’s offered now, for the third time, abundant blessings to Israel rather than curses.

The Or Ha’chayim, Rabbi Chaim ben Moshe Attar, tries to explain that Bilam’s blessings really are curses but Balak simply cannot hear the curses in the nicely phrased poetic words.  With due respect to the Sages, the point of the story here is to show the divergence between what Balak expected and what Bilam actually did.

Balak says to him, “I called you to curse my enemies and instead you have blessed them three times over!” (Numbers 24:10)

Bil’am frustrated Balak’s expectations, not once, nor twice, but three times over.

Think about a time when each of us has faced a similar dilemma.  We take a car to get repaired, and then either the repair itself fails or something else breaks down soon after compelling us to return to the body shop.  Or more poignant for us, when we receive news about a health test or diagnosis – what do we hope to hear?  Can we ever be prepared for bad news?   Why is it that people may even struggle with hearing good news when fully expecting the opposite?

I recently heard from a hopeful parent – she and her husband had been for many years seeking to adopt a child, and were prepared and ready to adopt this summer when they learned just yesterday that the birth mother decided to keep the child instead of giving the child up for adoption.

During this election season we are subject to candidates and parties who raise our expectations.  We often hear, “On my first day in office I will…” and fill in the blank.  We all know that legislative priorities are important but that creating and guiding legislation through the democratic process often takes longer and involves compromise. 

Still, we must always strive to meet high expectations with the best of ourselves.  God asks us in the wilderness to take upon ourselves laws and practices that are neither easy nor convenient, especially for people on the move.  God does this knowing that once we settle in the Holy Land we will likely get too settled, too comfortable and the urgency of nation-building and the first exciting part of the journey, the honeymoon period, will end and we will regress. 

In fact, in the same parsha we read today the people regressed the moment after Bilam praised the people and showed how we would triumph over our enemies.  It turns out the “enemy” is within – we might one day overcome Amalek and Kenites, but the danger of falling back on old patterns, of looking to other gods to worship, statues, local deities, idols – all these easily accessible divinities are easy and less demanding than the invisible God of the universe who not only asks for our faith and trust, but also for us to live a life of justice and compassion.  As we’ve seen in bloody reality lately, this demand is tragically flouted by many religious extremists.

But to ask a significant amount from the people then and now is the only way to encourage us to strive, to stretch and to grow. 

And what better time to re-emphasize this message than as the 3 weeks leading to Tisha B’Av get started this Sunday with our observance Sunday of the Shivah Asar B’Tamuz fast, the fast that recalls the sieges of Jerusalem that led to the destruction of both Temples, destructions that our tradition remembers not as the result of overwhelming enemy force but as the result of our people not striving earnestly enough to live up to one of the most significant and central expectations God sets for us – Ve’ahavta li’re’acha kamocha, you shall care for your fellow human being as yourself.

And, of course, we should never purchase a $100 cruise vacation.

Shabbat Shalom.