Israel, Iran the Obama administration, and the Future of the Middle East
Kol Nidre 5770
Some of you might know that the most popular sport in Israel is called football, which is really what we call soccer. The second most popular sport is basketball. The third most popular is tennis and, believe it or not, the fourth most popular sport in Israel would have to be archeology. “What?” you say, “how can archeology be a sport?” And yet, for many Israelis, this is the national sport. Kids go out in summer and work on archeological digs. Particularly significant finds are put on the front page of Israeli newspapers.
For example, 3,000 years ago there was a boy in the town of Gezer, who wrote a little ditty about the agricultural seasons on a writing tablet. That writing tablet was later found. The significance of the tablet is that is perhaps the oldest original Hebrew document that we have, going back some 3,000 years. In the last few months, archeologists have discovered the largest ever collection of rare coins from the time Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman from 132-136 C.E. The coins were found in a place where Jewish fighters hid from the Romans during the revolt. Elsewhere in the Galilee, archeologists recently discovered a synagogue from the Second Temple period. The middle of the synagogue was a stone engraved with the seven branch menorah. The significance of this is that it’s the only engraving of a menorah that actually comes from the period when the Second Temple stood. All three of these finds made the front page of the Israeli newspaper.
I mention this because part of anti-Israel propaganda during the current time is to say that Jews only came to Israel as a result of the Nazi holocaust during World War II. The truth of the matter is that Jews have lived continuously in Israel for more than 3,000 years. The reason why archeology is a national sport, therefore, is because the deeper the Jewish people dig the more we learn about our history.
Even those who lived in the Diaspora understood how precious Israel was. After my grandfather died, we found an olive wood booklet with pages on the inside consisting of pressed flowers from the city of Jerusalem. This booklet belonged to my great-grandfather Jacob. We do not know to this day why he had such a book, but I would like to think that he had it that it was his hope that someday he as a Jew would go to Israel. This was not to be. I wonder, as well, if he could have ever imagined that his great-grandson would be a citizen of Israel and serve in the Israeli army and that his great-great grandson would currently reside in the Tel-Aviv region.
But it was not only in my family that there was a connection to Israel. There was a rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto, who once showed his student a precious Megillah, a scroll of Esther. The scroll of Esther as you know tells of the story of Esther, Mordechai and the wicked Haman who sought to destroy the Jews. The rabbi proceeded to bury that scroll and tell his students there was a very good chance that the current Haman, none other than Adolf Hitler, would succeed in killing him and most of them. But he told them that if any of them survived, this scroll about persecution and Jewish redemption should be dug up and brought to the land of Israel. After the war, some of the people did survive. The scroll of Esther, the Megillah, was dug up and brought to Israel and is found in the Israel museum.
The connection of Jews to Israel, regardless of whether or not we were actually living in Israel or in the Diaspora, is more than 3,000 years old. For the Jewish people, this connection is eternal – even to the point that here in Greensboro, when we bury our loved ones, we sprinkle over there grave dirt from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. For us Jews, it is not only the land of Israel, but the state of Israel which is indeed very precious.
The aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust did not lead to the creation of the state of Israel. Tragically, had the state of Israel existed, perhaps as many as one million Jews could have found refuge from the Holocaust. The real tragedy of the Holocaust therefore, is not only that Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but that they had no place, including the United States of America and including the land Israel, to which to flee.
The state of Israel, wherein live some 6 million of our fellow Jews, has led to a revitalization of Jewish life both in Israel and throughout the world. If you have never been to Israel, please consider this a personal invitation. If you would like to go, there are adult spaces available this year on the March of the Living to Poland and Israel. We will be living on April 7th and returning on April 21st – if you are interested please see me. The experience of the land and the country of Israel is a life-changing one for Jews, and it is an experience that existentially changes how we view being Jewish.
There are three aspects of the Middle East right now which cause us in the pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-American community great concern.
The first was the presentation last week of the UN Human Rights Commission report criticizing the state of Israel for its actions last year in Gaza. A little background is in order. In 2005, the Israeli government withdrew from every square inch of Gaza. Shortly thereafter, a reign of terror began with more than 12,000 rockets being fired into southern Israel. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier whose picture sits on the chair to your right was kidnapped within Israel and has been held for now more than three years by Hamas. The International Red Cross has not been allowed to visit him, an egregious violation of international law. Hamas now rules Gaza, having overthrown the legitimately elected government there. In doing so, they were responsible for murdering many leaders of Fatah, their opposition. The world said nothing as this took place.
In contrast to this, the Human Relations Commission at the United Nation has issued 33 resolutions since 2006, 26 of these have been anti-Israel. Israel is the only country on the Human Rights Commissions’ permanent agenda.
The report issued last week libels Israel by saying from the very beginning its desire was to inflict great harm upon the civilian population of Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am glad to report that the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has vehemently criticized this latest smear attempt against Israel. The report fails to acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and other external threats. The report accuses Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The United States administration has said that it will veto any resolution coming to the Security Council from the Human Relations Commission dealing with this report. Apparently the US is unable to prevent the report from being referred to the International Criminal Court – which means that Israelis who fought in that war could be rather indiscriminately arrested by Interpol should they travel outside of the country. In the Senate, Senators Gillibrand-Isakson have introduced a letter criticizing the Human Relations Commission report. Their letter insists that Israel must have a right to defend itself against terrorism. This latest attempt to smear Israel through the United Nations is another in the pernicious cycle of denying the state of Israel its right to exist.
The second issue of great concern to me concerning Israel and the Middle East concerns the status of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The summit meeting last week between President Obama, President Abbas of the Palestinian authority, and Prime Minister Netenyahu seems to have accomplished very little. But here we need to pause for a moment and consider what has gone on within the past nine months.
When the Obama administration came into power, the strategy was that by seeming to adopt a hard-line toward Israel, the Arab nations and the Palestinians would come to the table and be more inclined to making peace. This pressure on Israel was accomplished in two ways. First, there was to be an absolute freeze on all sorts of settlement construction activity. In truth, the settlement issue, as much as it is problematic was not the real problem. The problem here was the Arab-Palestinian refusal to accept Israel as a legitimate partner for peace and as Jewish state.
The second way in which President Obama reached out to the Palestinians and Arabs was through his Cairo speech. The speech was an important overture toward the Arab world. It was not all that well-received in Israel.
Now what were the results of these overtures?
Well, first of all, there has not been one single achievement as far as decreasing Arab intransigence is concerned. As a matter of fact, the opposite has taken place. Now, additional pre-conditions have been set by the Palestinians for negotiations with Israel. These include an absolute settlement freeze and a return to the 1967 lines. Because of the reaction to the overture, we are seeing increasingly hard line position pushing direct negotiations even farther away.
In addition, President Obama had hoped to get some sort of concession from the Saudi Arabia. Not one was to be forthcoming – not diplomatic recognition, not even fly-over rights for El Al jets, nothing.
Now I am not going to sit here and tell you that I think the strategy pursued by the Obama administration was a mistake. However, what I am glad to report to is that, as of this week, due partly to pressure from those in Congress who are pro-Israel, the Obama administration has declared that at the beginning of negotiations, there need not be a one hundred percent freeze on all settlements. President Obama stated that the time has come for the parties to come to the table without preconditions.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has indicated his readiness to speak about all issues, President Abbas and the Arabs have not shown such willingness.
In Israel, this change in American approach will be most welcome. A recent public opinion poll showed that only four percent of the Israeli population feels that President Obama is friendly to Israel.
In addition, it is worth noting at this time that Israel has taken significant steps to improve the life of the Palestinians on the West Bank. These include the removal of check points and the easing of economic restrictions. The result has been that in the past year there has been a seven percent increase in the Gross Domestic Product in the West Bank.
Clearly, events of the last week have shown that it is now the responsibility of the Arab-states and the Palestinians to come to the table. It is now time for the Saudis to exert their influence to bring about recognition of Israel and to encourage the peace process. Hopefully, the United States will continue the current level of foreign aid to Israel, realizing that only a strong Israel will be able to take the steps necessary for peace.
And this brings me to the third issue of concern, and it should be no surprise to you – the issue of Iranian nuclearization. Whatever sermon I had planned to give tonight, drastically changed Friday morning when it was revealed that the Iranian government has another nuclear enrichment plant which they had been keeping secret from the International Atomic Energy Commission and from the West. Within the past year, Iran has lied to the United States three times and has now been caught three times. According to recent Western intelligence, Iran has now succeeded in designing a missile column to fit a nuclear warhead. It has during the past two years, doubled the number faster centrifuges to work on uranium enrichment. The Iranians have stockpiled enough low enriched uranium (LEU) that if it chose to further enrich it, could within a matter of months have enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon. As far as we all know, they have not made the decision to further enrich but, rather, are adding to their stockpile of LEU. Iran has also gone into home production of nuclear fuel rods for plutonium.
Make no mistake about it, as strong as Israel is, this is potentially an existential threat to Israel as well as to the West.
Here you have an Iranian theocratic administration which not only denies the Holocaust, but has announced its intention to wipe Israel off the map. Here you have an administration that stole and election in June and has brutally cracked down on its own people. The Iranian administration is making a mockery of human rights as it has arrested and murdered its own people, including the young woman Neda Agha-Soltan who was brutally murdered in an anti-government demonstration.
Discussions are to begin October 1st between the permanent members of the Security Council, Germany, and Iran. The purpose of the negotiations is to help the Iranians understand that they have a choice of joining the nations of the world in pursuit of peace or continuing down their very dangerous road toward nuclear proliferation. If these fail, additional sanctions could be forthcoming. The United States is now trying to lay the ground work for sanctions. The Chinese have been resistant, but on Thursday, the Russian President Medevadev announced that Russia might possibly support them.
The US strategy for the next three months should be the prevention of Iranian nuclear capability and a commitment that Iran will stop its refinement of enriched uranium and open up all of its facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Commission.
Our part as Americans and as people who support Israel is to help our fellow citizens understand that a nuclear Iran will lead to increased nuclear arms race in the Middle East. It will severely damage Middle East peace process. It will be an immediate threat to Europe and a potential threat to the United States. A nuclear Iran will increase the chance that world terrorist organizations such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and even al-Qaeda will receive nuclear weapons and use them against Israel, the West, or the United States. In the next weeks and months, we should be in touch with the Whitehouse and with our members of Congress via letters, emails and phone calls to let them know that we support sanctions and American efforts to prevent Iranian nuclearization.
It is up to us to state that as important as the health care debate is, the discussion of Iran nuclearization is even more pressing for it does nothing less than threaten the security of the free world.
The points that I have made today are indeed very serious and part of me thinks that this may be one of the most important sermons I have ever given in my life. One of the greatest Conservative Rabbis of the 20th Century, Arthur Hertzberg, once gave a sermon in the 1930s warning his congregation on Yom Kippur of the threat of Nazism. He was roundly excoriated for this sermon by his congregants and later asked to leave the congregation. I do not believe, thank God, that this is about to happen to me – but I do hope that you will take these concerns of mine, concerns reflected by most of the pro-Israel community in the United States, very seriously. In order to address these concerns, we will all need to work together.
Recently I asked a young girl in our congregation what if a bird which had a broken wing could fly. She answered me that it most certainly could not. I then asked her what would happen to such a bird. She answered that it would eventually fall out of a tree to the ground where it would be eaten by another animal.
We need both wings to fly!
Dealing with the Iranian threat will require that those on both the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, put aside their political pettiness and disagreements in order to come together. We need to reach out to people of all faiths and races, in order to help them understand just how serious this problem is.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism, told a story about another bird. In his story, a young student came to his rabbi with the intention of proving that the rabbi was not as wise as everyone thought. He was going to ask the rabbi if a bird that he was holding in his hand was alive or dead. If the rabbi said the bird was alive, he would immediately crush it. If he said it was dead, he would open his hand and show the rabbi the living bird.
The rabbi understood when approach by the student what was going on and answered, “Son, I am not sure whether or not the bird is alive or dead or will live or will die – but I am certainly positive that the future of the bird lies within your hands.”
Now more than ever, my dear friends, I am convinced that the future of the free world lies in the ability of the United States to provide significant leadership for peace while making sure that terrorists and rogue states such as Iran do not possess nuclear weapons.
Earlier in this speech, I mentioned a rabbi who, together with his students buried the Megillah, the scroll of Esther in the Warsaw Ghetto. They buried it because the Haman of their time, Hitler, was threatening to kill all of them. They hoped that one day they would dig up the Megillah and take it to Israel and some of them did so.
If there is any lesson in that story, if there is any message that needs to be taken from this sermon, it is that the time has passed when we are going to bury our holy texts. The time has passed for us as Jews to bury our heads in the sand while Hamans, Hitlers, or Ahmenidijahads threaten our people and threaten the free world. In the words of Elie Wiesel, “We have learned to trust the threats of our enemies more than the promises of our friends.”
In the spirit of the famous twenty third Psalm, we “have walked though the valley of the shadow of death.” Our answer to those who would deny this fact would be to say that all it takes for memories to be erased is for lies to be unopposed. We have walked through the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the fields of Babi Yar, but this time more than sixty years later, “we will fear no evil.”
The time has passed when Jewish people are powerless. The state of Israel is indeed strong and the ability of American Jews to influence the current administration has perhaps never been stronger.
On this Yom Kippur, on this night of Kol Nidre, the holiest night of all the Jewish year, it is time for us to recommit ourselves to our God and to our People. It is time for us to recommit ourselves to the pursuance of peace and security for Israel and for our country.
The time has passed when Jews will bury Holy texts in the face of evil!
May God bless Israel, bless the United States of America, and bless us with a year of health, security and above all peace.
May the One who causes peace to reign in the high heavens, let peace descend on us from all of the people of Israel and all of the world, and together we say, Amen.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,
“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,
endlessly patient…” Part II
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5970
Last night we looked at the prayer which immediately follows the Avinu Malkaynu during the High Holy days. Later this morning we will hear this prayer sung by Lane. Please take a look at the prayer now on page 122.
The prayer reads “The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.”
I mentioned last night that when this prayer is recited we are asking God to forgive us of our sins and misdeeds. However, I feel that in a way we are reliving two occasions in the Torah wherein this prayer is to be found. Last night I spoke of how the prayer is found after the incident with the Golden Calf and after Moses receives the second set of the tablets containing the Ten Commandments.
Let us now turn to the second time that the phrase (although not in its entirety) appears in the Torah and let us see what lessons we might be able to learn from this occurrence.
The people of Israel have been wandering in the desert. It had been a year since they had been liberated from Egypt. Being close to the Promised Land, Moses decided to send out twelve spies to check out the land. The twelve spies were men of renown, one representative of each tribe.
The spies return from the land carrying a cluster of grapes that was so large that it needed to be carried on a pole by two men. All seem to agree that the land is indeed a land of milk and honey, a land with good grazing and good agricultural potential.
From here, however, the twelve spies break into two groups. Ten of the spies say “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the very large men, giants, there. 29Amalekites dwell in the Negev region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan.”[2][1]
A commotion must have broken out. One of the remaining spies, Caleb, says, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”
But according to the text: “The men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” Thus they spread lies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size ….. we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
Notice that they not only referred to themselves as grasshoppers, meaning that they viewed themselves as small and insignificant, but that they also said that they felt that others perceived them in such as way as well!
At this point, “The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night. 2All the Israelites railed against Moses and Aaron.
“If only we had died in the land of Egypt,” the whole community shouted at them, “or if only we might die in this wilderness! 3Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” 4And they said to one another, “Let us head back for Egypt.”
Last night, when God was giving Moses the second set of commandments, it was God who described himself as “merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.” This time however, it is Moses who uses God’s words to ask God to forgive the people. God answered that he will forgive the people but only their children, and not them, will enter the Promised Land.
Now when you ask most people what, according to the Torah, was the worst sin done by the Israelites while in the desert, most people will answer that it was the incident of the Golden Calf which we discussed last night. However, according to the Torah, this reaction of the Israelites to the report of the spies is the very worst sin. We know this because the punishment is not merely a plague, but a declaration that because of their slave like mentality, they would not be able to enter the Promised Land. Because they were still thinking like slaves in Egypt, they were not worthy or prepared to enter the land as a free people.
This story shows that like slaves, they did not have three critical ingredients necessary to proceed. First, they had lost confidence in their own abilities even to the extent that they transferred their own lack of self confidence to others by saying that others too perceived them as grasshoppers. Second, they had lost their faith in God, the very God who had liberated them from Egypt with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Third, they had lost their vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.
I would maintain that we are like them in that these are three sins of which many of us are guilty.
Many of us do lack self confidence. We do lack faith in our own abilities. Like the people in the desert, this is a great sin. Now in Judaism, sin is referred to as “het.” In modern Hebrew, it is the root to describe a missed free throw. It literally means “missing the mark” as though we were an archer who missed the bull’s eye on a target.
An earthly king came to a village and noticed that there were targets on the side of the barns of the building and that in the center of each target was an arrow. The king had never seen anything quite like this. He inquired as to whom the archer was for he wanted the marksman for his own army. The people of the village proceeded to inform him that the man that he was looking for was the meshugenah Yankele who went around firing arrows at barns and then painted targets around the arrows. Of course, at this point the earthly king lost all interests in Yankele.
The story intrigues me for two reasons. First of all, it shows me that one way to view repentance or teshuvah is to admit our wrong and then make the wrong into a right. This is turning something bad into something good. The arrows have been fired by us in a haphazard, helter skelter way, and now it is our task to paint the target around them!
Second, let us realize that unlike the earthly king, the heavenly king still desires that we be soldiers in his army. God still desires that we become agents of healing and repair. God still desires that we become (in Al Vorspan’s immortal words) “nudniks for justice!”
The second sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their faith in God. God had not only brought them out of Egypt, but it was God that had given them manna and protected them along the way. It is not easy to tell someone how to renew their faith in God, especially when, personally, I see the presence of God in so many ways. Recently, I have seen God’s presence in the mother who with a tear in her eye is trying to breastfeed her baby in an intensive care unit at the hospital. I see the presence of God in the son who stood by his mother’s bed constantly for two weeks until she drew her last breath.
I see the presence of God in the waves of the sea and feel it in the clear mountain air of the Blue Ridge or Rockies.
I see the presence of God in the way in which our young people cared for and nurtured the survivors who went with us on last year’s March of the Living. On that trip, one of our survivors, Rabbi Larry Berkowitz, was a survivor of Auschwitz. While we were standing at the steps of the gas chamber and crematorium number two, the steps from which people went down to change their clothes prior to gassing, Larry descended one of the steps and then said the following. “This is the place. This is the place where my mother and my younger brother and sister died. This is the step on which my mother saw her last bit of daylight or her last view of the moon and stars.”
In today’s Torah portion, an angel intercedes and acknowledges Abraham’s faith and prevents him from sacrificing his son. There would be no angel to rescue Larry’s mother, but less than five minutes later, Rabbi Berkowitz chanted the El Male Rachameem prayer for his mother, siblings and all of the victims and then led us in the Kaddish. It does not make a lot of sense to me even today, but at that moment I sensed in him some special meaning. Perhaps it was healing. Perhaps it was closure for him as an eighty two year old man who had been a sixteen year old adolescent with working hands in Auschwitz. I am not sure what it was, but even in that moment I felt the presence of God.
So I am not sure what the exact recipe is for getting back one’s faith, but I am convinced that getting it back can be quite important in helping us heal, in helping us to regain vision and in helping us to become healthy.
Recently my friend and our fellow congregant, Dr. Jim Adelman, loaned me a book entitled “How God Changes Your Brain” by Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. For those who do not know Jim, he is a prominent neurologist in Greensboro and is really such an upbeat guy. I was visiting him as he was recovering from a hip replacement at which time he said to me, “Fred, you gotta read this book!”
Well, he was correct. The book is fabulous. The authors, both of whom are scientists and one of whom is a physician, demonstrate that functional brain scans show that certain positive things happen to our brain when we have faith in a loving God. Studies have shown that a belief that God will give us the strength and courage to face the vicissitudes of life may also improve our health, or at least the health of our brains. Our brains seem to me more dynamic than previously thought. Studies have shown that those who frequently pray or mediate are less susceptible to dementia and seem to be able to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s, apparently by actually changing the hardwiring of our brains!
Newberg and Waldman list eight ways to exercise your brain. They are, in descending order.
8. Smile
7. Stay intellectually active
6. Consciously relax
5. Yawn (though hopefully not during this sermon!)
4. Meditate
3. Aerobic Exercise
2. Dialogue with others
And the number one best way to exercise one’s brain is to have faith. In the words of Newberg and Waldman “Faith is equivalent with hope and optimism, and the belief that a positive future awaits us.” (p.164)
So today, let us not be like the Jews of the desert who when facing despair, lost their faith in a loving God. Rather as difficult as it might seem, let us maintain the faith that God can be a source of strength, courage and serenity and let us do so by looking for evidence of God’s presence in our world.
Finally, the third sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their vision of the Promised Land. A proverb in the bible states: “18For lack of vision a people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18) What the verse literally means is that without vision, there is anarchy. The word for anarchy used here ironically comes from the same root as the word for Pharaoh. In other words, one could interpret the verse to mean that without vision we are slaves. Without vision, we re-enslave ourselves.
Those who are facing tough times need not only to get their “groove” back, they need to regain their vision. Those of us in their families and in their community need to become agents who help those who need it regain their sense of their own personal Promised Land.
Above all, the passage is telling us that God desires that we envision a better future in order that we might work towards its fulfillment.
In Judaism, there is a concept called, “Yeridah le tsorech aliyah” which translated means, “We go down only to ascend.” The Psalmist says: “From the depths I cry to you,” meaning that from the depths I cry to God to help me ascend! Therefore, our attitudes need to be that there is no such thing as “down.”
Yes, there are times of despair for many of us, but the sages tell us that despair is an essential part of Teshuvah. Despair needs to give us the power to move toward change, to break through the chains of what is holding you down or back. Despair is a birth pang to something else.
You may have lost your job. You may have suffered financial set backs. You may be ill. You may be worried about your children, parents or another loved one. You may be dealing with a difficult time at work and all of these can cause you to despair.
Yet the story of the spies is one that tells us not to despair, but to have faith that although we are down at this moment, we are about to ascend at the next moment. It is because of this that I have always felt that a Jew is a pessimist with hope!
So if this applies to you, listen to the following phrase, learn this phrase and share it with someone who needs it. The phrase is: “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Listen to it again. “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Now say it with me: “Every setback is a set up for a comeback.”
So once again the three most serious sins in the Torah done by the generation of the desert were:
1. Loss of confidence in their own abilities.
2. Loss of faith in God and
3. Loss of vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.
In just a few moments we will stand before the open ark and Lane will chant the prayer that Moses asked of God when he asked God to forgive the people of these three sins. As we hear this, let us remember that all too often many of us have been guilty of the same three sins. Let us ask for God to help us regain our confidence in our own abilities, our faith in God and our vision as to what our personal “Promised Land” would look like.
Moses in our story says to God “7Therefore, I pray, let my Lord’s forbearance be great, as You have declared, saying, 18‘The Lord! slow to anger and abounding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression; ….
19Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt.”
God’s answer is “סָלַחְתִּי כִּדְבָרֶֽךָ”
“I pardon, as you have asked.”
May God pardon us for losing our vision and faith and may we all be blessed with a renewal of faith and vision, a year of blessing, health and peace.
May God bless us with peace in our lives and the lives of our families, our congregation and community, our nation and our world.
Leshanah Tovah tikatayvu – May we be inscribed for a blessing in the Book of Life! Amen
endlessly patient…” Part II
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5970
Last night we looked at the prayer which immediately follows the Avinu Malkaynu during the High Holy days. Later this morning we will hear this prayer sung by Lane. Please take a look at the prayer now on page 122.
The prayer reads “The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.”
I mentioned last night that when this prayer is recited we are asking God to forgive us of our sins and misdeeds. However, I feel that in a way we are reliving two occasions in the Torah wherein this prayer is to be found. Last night I spoke of how the prayer is found after the incident with the Golden Calf and after Moses receives the second set of the tablets containing the Ten Commandments.
Let us now turn to the second time that the phrase (although not in its entirety) appears in the Torah and let us see what lessons we might be able to learn from this occurrence.
The people of Israel have been wandering in the desert. It had been a year since they had been liberated from Egypt. Being close to the Promised Land, Moses decided to send out twelve spies to check out the land. The twelve spies were men of renown, one representative of each tribe.
The spies return from the land carrying a cluster of grapes that was so large that it needed to be carried on a pole by two men. All seem to agree that the land is indeed a land of milk and honey, a land with good grazing and good agricultural potential.
From here, however, the twelve spies break into two groups. Ten of the spies say “The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the very large men, giants, there. 29Amalekites dwell in the Negev region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan.”[2][1]
A commotion must have broken out. One of the remaining spies, Caleb, says, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”
But according to the text: “The men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” Thus they spread lies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size ….. we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
Notice that they not only referred to themselves as grasshoppers, meaning that they viewed themselves as small and insignificant, but that they also said that they felt that others perceived them in such as way as well!
At this point, “The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night. 2All the Israelites railed against Moses and Aaron.
“If only we had died in the land of Egypt,” the whole community shouted at them, “or if only we might die in this wilderness! 3Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” 4And they said to one another, “Let us head back for Egypt.”
Last night, when God was giving Moses the second set of commandments, it was God who described himself as “merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.” This time however, it is Moses who uses God’s words to ask God to forgive the people. God answered that he will forgive the people but only their children, and not them, will enter the Promised Land.
Now when you ask most people what, according to the Torah, was the worst sin done by the Israelites while in the desert, most people will answer that it was the incident of the Golden Calf which we discussed last night. However, according to the Torah, this reaction of the Israelites to the report of the spies is the very worst sin. We know this because the punishment is not merely a plague, but a declaration that because of their slave like mentality, they would not be able to enter the Promised Land. Because they were still thinking like slaves in Egypt, they were not worthy or prepared to enter the land as a free people.
This story shows that like slaves, they did not have three critical ingredients necessary to proceed. First, they had lost confidence in their own abilities even to the extent that they transferred their own lack of self confidence to others by saying that others too perceived them as grasshoppers. Second, they had lost their faith in God, the very God who had liberated them from Egypt with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Third, they had lost their vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.
I would maintain that we are like them in that these are three sins of which many of us are guilty.
Many of us do lack self confidence. We do lack faith in our own abilities. Like the people in the desert, this is a great sin. Now in Judaism, sin is referred to as “het.” In modern Hebrew, it is the root to describe a missed free throw. It literally means “missing the mark” as though we were an archer who missed the bull’s eye on a target.
An earthly king came to a village and noticed that there were targets on the side of the barns of the building and that in the center of each target was an arrow. The king had never seen anything quite like this. He inquired as to whom the archer was for he wanted the marksman for his own army. The people of the village proceeded to inform him that the man that he was looking for was the meshugenah Yankele who went around firing arrows at barns and then painted targets around the arrows. Of course, at this point the earthly king lost all interests in Yankele.
The story intrigues me for two reasons. First of all, it shows me that one way to view repentance or teshuvah is to admit our wrong and then make the wrong into a right. This is turning something bad into something good. The arrows have been fired by us in a haphazard, helter skelter way, and now it is our task to paint the target around them!
Second, let us realize that unlike the earthly king, the heavenly king still desires that we be soldiers in his army. God still desires that we become agents of healing and repair. God still desires that we become (in Al Vorspan’s immortal words) “nudniks for justice!”
The second sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their faith in God. God had not only brought them out of Egypt, but it was God that had given them manna and protected them along the way. It is not easy to tell someone how to renew their faith in God, especially when, personally, I see the presence of God in so many ways. Recently, I have seen God’s presence in the mother who with a tear in her eye is trying to breastfeed her baby in an intensive care unit at the hospital. I see the presence of God in the son who stood by his mother’s bed constantly for two weeks until she drew her last breath.
I see the presence of God in the waves of the sea and feel it in the clear mountain air of the Blue Ridge or Rockies.
I see the presence of God in the way in which our young people cared for and nurtured the survivors who went with us on last year’s March of the Living. On that trip, one of our survivors, Rabbi Larry Berkowitz, was a survivor of Auschwitz. While we were standing at the steps of the gas chamber and crematorium number two, the steps from which people went down to change their clothes prior to gassing, Larry descended one of the steps and then said the following. “This is the place. This is the place where my mother and my younger brother and sister died. This is the step on which my mother saw her last bit of daylight or her last view of the moon and stars.”
In today’s Torah portion, an angel intercedes and acknowledges Abraham’s faith and prevents him from sacrificing his son. There would be no angel to rescue Larry’s mother, but less than five minutes later, Rabbi Berkowitz chanted the El Male Rachameem prayer for his mother, siblings and all of the victims and then led us in the Kaddish. It does not make a lot of sense to me even today, but at that moment I sensed in him some special meaning. Perhaps it was healing. Perhaps it was closure for him as an eighty two year old man who had been a sixteen year old adolescent with working hands in Auschwitz. I am not sure what it was, but even in that moment I felt the presence of God.
So I am not sure what the exact recipe is for getting back one’s faith, but I am convinced that getting it back can be quite important in helping us heal, in helping us to regain vision and in helping us to become healthy.
Recently my friend and our fellow congregant, Dr. Jim Adelman, loaned me a book entitled “How God Changes Your Brain” by Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. For those who do not know Jim, he is a prominent neurologist in Greensboro and is really such an upbeat guy. I was visiting him as he was recovering from a hip replacement at which time he said to me, “Fred, you gotta read this book!”
Well, he was correct. The book is fabulous. The authors, both of whom are scientists and one of whom is a physician, demonstrate that functional brain scans show that certain positive things happen to our brain when we have faith in a loving God. Studies have shown that a belief that God will give us the strength and courage to face the vicissitudes of life may also improve our health, or at least the health of our brains. Our brains seem to me more dynamic than previously thought. Studies have shown that those who frequently pray or mediate are less susceptible to dementia and seem to be able to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s, apparently by actually changing the hardwiring of our brains!
Newberg and Waldman list eight ways to exercise your brain. They are, in descending order.
8. Smile
7. Stay intellectually active
6. Consciously relax
5. Yawn (though hopefully not during this sermon!)
4. Meditate
3. Aerobic Exercise
2. Dialogue with others
And the number one best way to exercise one’s brain is to have faith. In the words of Newberg and Waldman “Faith is equivalent with hope and optimism, and the belief that a positive future awaits us.” (p.164)
So today, let us not be like the Jews of the desert who when facing despair, lost their faith in a loving God. Rather as difficult as it might seem, let us maintain the faith that God can be a source of strength, courage and serenity and let us do so by looking for evidence of God’s presence in our world.
Finally, the third sin of the desert generation was that they had lost their vision of the Promised Land. A proverb in the bible states: “18For lack of vision a people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18) What the verse literally means is that without vision, there is anarchy. The word for anarchy used here ironically comes from the same root as the word for Pharaoh. In other words, one could interpret the verse to mean that without vision we are slaves. Without vision, we re-enslave ourselves.
Those who are facing tough times need not only to get their “groove” back, they need to regain their vision. Those of us in their families and in their community need to become agents who help those who need it regain their sense of their own personal Promised Land.
Above all, the passage is telling us that God desires that we envision a better future in order that we might work towards its fulfillment.
In Judaism, there is a concept called, “Yeridah le tsorech aliyah” which translated means, “We go down only to ascend.” The Psalmist says: “From the depths I cry to you,” meaning that from the depths I cry to God to help me ascend! Therefore, our attitudes need to be that there is no such thing as “down.”
Yes, there are times of despair for many of us, but the sages tell us that despair is an essential part of Teshuvah. Despair needs to give us the power to move toward change, to break through the chains of what is holding you down or back. Despair is a birth pang to something else.
You may have lost your job. You may have suffered financial set backs. You may be ill. You may be worried about your children, parents or another loved one. You may be dealing with a difficult time at work and all of these can cause you to despair.
Yet the story of the spies is one that tells us not to despair, but to have faith that although we are down at this moment, we are about to ascend at the next moment. It is because of this that I have always felt that a Jew is a pessimist with hope!
So if this applies to you, listen to the following phrase, learn this phrase and share it with someone who needs it. The phrase is: “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Listen to it again. “Every setback is a setup for a comeback.” Now say it with me: “Every setback is a set up for a comeback.”
So once again the three most serious sins in the Torah done by the generation of the desert were:
1. Loss of confidence in their own abilities.
2. Loss of faith in God and
3. Loss of vision as to what life in the Promised Land could be.
In just a few moments we will stand before the open ark and Lane will chant the prayer that Moses asked of God when he asked God to forgive the people of these three sins. As we hear this, let us remember that all too often many of us have been guilty of the same three sins. Let us ask for God to help us regain our confidence in our own abilities, our faith in God and our vision as to what our personal “Promised Land” would look like.
Moses in our story says to God “7Therefore, I pray, let my Lord’s forbearance be great, as You have declared, saying, 18‘The Lord! slow to anger and abounding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression; ….
19Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt.”
God’s answer is “סָלַחְתִּי כִּדְבָרֶֽךָ”
“I pardon, as you have asked.”
May God pardon us for losing our vision and faith and may we all be blessed with a renewal of faith and vision, a year of blessing, health and peace.
May God bless us with peace in our lives and the lives of our families, our congregation and community, our nation and our world.
Leshanah Tovah tikatayvu – May we be inscribed for a blessing in the Book of Life! Amen
“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,
“The Eternal One, the Eternal God is merciful and gracious,
endlessly patient…” Part I
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5970
Greensboro, North Carolina
During the High Holy days before we take the Torah out of the ark, there are two additional pieces of liturgy which are recited. These are not recited on Shabbat. The first is called the Avinu Malkenu. When we recite this prayer, we ask God to hear us and we acknowledge that we have sinned. We ask that we should be blessed with a good year and that the world should no longer be plagued by war and oppression. Finally, we ask that we all be blessed for inclusion in the book of life.
This year we will hear Max Janowski’s incredibly beautiful version of Avinu Malkenu four times and thanks to Janet and Brooks, we have added a violin and a cello part. The Avinu Malkenu soloists will be Emily Siar, Debbie Thacker, Jeanne Fischer and Lane Ridenhour.
The second piece of liturgy occurs immediately after the Avinu Malkenu and is sung by Lane. Turn to page 122 and you will see this prayer. The prayer reads: “The Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.” Biblical commentators have viewed this phrase as the closet description of God’s attributes found in the Torah.
We hear this after the Avinu Malkenu as if to remind God that God should have mercy on us because of our sins and transgressions. By itself it is a very powerful moment. Immediately after it is sung, we proceed to take the Torah out of the ark.
However, I would like for us to consider that if we delve into the biblical background of this phrase, we might find that its awesome quality during this season is heightened and that it can have an additional meaning to us.
The phrase occurs twice in the Torah. The first time is in Exodus 34 and is said by God to Moses as God is granting to Moses the second set of tablets of the Ten Commandants. The second time occurs in Numbers in a slightly abbreviated form and is said by Moses to God towards the end of the incident of the spies.
Tonight, we will examine the story of the second tablets and tomorrow we will examine the story of the spies.
The first time the phrase “The Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon” is at the end of the story of the Golden Calf. You will remember the details. Moses is on Mt. Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments and he seems to be delayed in coming down. The people, feeling insecure and abandoned, make a golden calf to replace Moses. When Moses does come down from the mountain, he finds people dancing in ecstasy around the calf. In anger, Moses throws down the original two tablets. A plague follows. God does not destroy the entire people. God will give Moses a second set of tablets during which God proclaims to Moses the phrase: “The Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon.”
So imagine that we are standing before the open ark and the terrible sin of building the Golden Calf is on our consciences. This is rather difficult to do, but while we may not have built an actual golden calf, there are certain things that we have done during the past year that remind us of their sin.
The first of these is how we have been reactive to others and to situations. For the people, they reacted to the insecurity caused by the delay in Moses’ return by doing something incredibly stupid; namely, rejecting the God who had freed them from Egypt and building a golden calf. For Moses, his reactivity occurs when in anger he smashed the tablets. How could he have possibly known that these precious tablets, the most precious thing ever given by God to humans, would be given a second time? In his anger, he has potentially done a catastrophic deed in terms of the future of humanity.
Friends. There is not one of us here who has not reacted either with stupidity or in anger when we feel threatened or insecure. These are not the moments in our lives that we would like to remember, but this is the time of year when we, as Jews, do remember these times, even if their remembrance is painful. Perhaps we were short to our children or to our parents? Perhaps you can remember a time when you overreacted to something a spouse or a loved one said? Perhaps there was a time when you answered a colleague at work with a short temper or thought ill of someone without pausing to think of their motivations or to understand the facts that led to their behavior. In all of these cases, being reactive instead of responding with calm and pensive thought, leads to wrong decisions and actions on our part and so often these decisions and actions are made out of anger.
The rabbis felt that when we respond in such a way, we are giving in to our Yetzer Hara, our inclination to do evil. Eighteen hundred years ago, a great teacher named Ben Zoma was asked “Who is mighty?” The answer given was than the mighty person is the one who can subdue his or her evil inclination. For the Jew, the ideal is not to be reactive but to be in self control. To the outside world, we seem to focus too much on our commandments and behavior and not enough on our theology. But this is not entirely true. Look once again how God is described in the verse. God is described as Erech Apayim which is translated as “endlessly patient” but can also mean “slow to anger.” When we are contemplative and non-reactive in our behavior, we are imitatio dei, imitators of God.
There is an incredible verse in Proverbs which reads, “It is better to be slow to anger than to be mighty and it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city.”
So the Jewish ideal of power is to be slow to anger, contemplative instead of being immediately reactive to situations.
So in this respect during the past year, there have been few if any of us who have not been like those standing at the base of the mountain waiting for Moses’ to come down. In our fear and insecurity, we have chosen reaction over thoughtfulness, weakness over true might.
So close your eyes for a few seconds and think of one instance during this past year when you have been overly reactive to something or someone else. Now open your eyes and let us continue.
* * * * * *
The second sin that plagued the generation who built the calf, as well as us, is the idea that if we have the gold, we will be happy. As a matter of fact, going for the gold, accumulating wealth, though not necessarily bad does not necessarily lead to happiness or to a life of meaning.
Anecdotally, we have heard that people who win the lottery are more prone to suicide and other self-destructive behaviors than they were before they won. If you want to see a miserable, but wealthy bunch of people, pick up one of the celebrity magazines the next time you are standing in a checkout line at a grocery store. This one is sleeping with that one. This one is an alcoholic. That one is overweight. You get the idea.
In a recent interview, Bernie Madoff’s secretary mentions that he was a quite irascible and demeaning man to work for.
But this desire for gelt as in the Madoff case has also done incredible damage to our country. It has led us to believe that it is all about “me” and not about the community. Madoff’s egregious crime, in addition to robbing retirees of the retirement funds, has caused incredible damage to Jewish educational institutions, federations and Jewish philanthropic funds. Being a psychopath, he did not hesitate to steal money from anyone, his best friends or even Eli Weisel.
While Madoff may be the extreme, I would maintain that a large part of the problems facing our country come from the desire of people to obtain more and more money without thinking of the consequences of their actions on the country or the world. Prime lenders and banks lent to get large commissions up front on their loans, without thinking what the harm could be if millions started defaulting on their loans. American car manufacturers continued to build large gas guzzlers because the profit margins were larger without thinking about the fact that these cars would increase our dependence on foreign oil and would adversely affect our trade deficit. The oil companies themselves lobbied against electric cars and alternative fuels, again, in order to maintain profits. Last year, our hardly benevolent pharmaceutical companies spent four times the amount on advertising drugs like Viagra and Levitra, than they did on research.
Going for the gold, going for the gelt, at the expense of others has really damaged this country by increasing unemployment and causing the value of investments to decline.
However, I would maintain that this too is a function of our Yetzer Hara, our inclination to do evil. The problem is not merely Madoff and the big corporations, it is us. What did Pogo, the legendary opossum of the famous Walt Kelly comic strip of yesteryear say, “WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US?” There are times when we have placed money before family. There are times when we have placed luxury ahead of being charitable. There are times when we have placed gelt ahead of learning, materials ahead of values. There are times when we too have built golden calves and caused the commandments to be smashed.
So now for a second time, close your eyes for a few seconds and think of one instance during this past year when you have placed the chase for material well being ahead of family, community, country or God. Now open your eyes and let us continue.
* * * * * *
The third sin that befell the generation that built the golden calf may be seen in Aaron. Listen to the actual text and focus your attention on the role of Aaron, the high priest and brother of Moses. Aaron is to be spiritual leader of the people and remember that in Moses’ absence, Aaron is also the head of the community. The text reads:
“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” 2Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3And all the people took off the gold rings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4This he took from them and cast in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” 5When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron announced: “Tomorrow shall be a festival of the Lord!” 6Early next day, the people offered up burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; they sat down to eat and drink, and then rose to dance.[1][1]
What was Aaron thinking of? Why did he jettison his values so easily? Why was he such a failure as a leader?
The answer given by the rabbis is certainly an interesting one. The rabbis viewed Aaron as a peacemaker. He apparently would do anything to make peace, even if it involved a rejection of the covenant between God and the Jewish people.
So as we stand before the open ark tomorrow, let us contemplate how many times we too have taken the easy road. Maybe we just wanted to avoid conflict? May we just want to be well liked? When were those times when we did not stand up for what we know to be just and right?
For all of us, expediency sometimes comes at the cost of sacrificing our values. We know that Judaism is important and that it has a lot to teach us, yet there are so many other things that demand our time. A rabbi was once asked by a parent, “Rabbi, how can I be sure that my child will study Torah?” The answer that the rabbi gave was, “Your child will study Torah when he sees you studying Torah.”
Our children will emulate our values. If they see that Judaism is not all that important to us, then it will not be all that important to them. If they see Sunday after Sunday that we drop them off for religious school, instead of coming in to temple to be a part of the community and learn as adults, then we ought not to be surprised when they grow up to be like us. Indeed, the carpool tunnel syndrome is one of our greatest problems!
So now for a final time, close your eyes for a few seconds and think of one instance during this past year when you have sacrificed your values and chosen the easy or expedient way just because you wished to avoid conflict. Now open your eyes and let us continue.
* * * * * *
So tomorrow morning as we are about to take out the Torah and as we hear Lane sing the words, “The Eternal God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin and granting pardon,” let us remember the people who built the golden calf. Let us also remember the three sins we have silently recalled tonight and ask God for forgiveness. Like the people who built the calf, we have been needlessly reactive to stress, uncertainty and fear. Like them, we have all too often felt that riches could solve all of our problems and all too often have ignored how our own greed could be detrimental to the community. Finally, let us recall the times when we have sacrificed our values on the altar of expediency and popularity.
But then, let us listen to the words of the prayer. God is merciful to us. God is saying to us that we can be forgiven for these sins. If Moses can receive a second set of tablets, we can receive a second or third chance to repair our lives. God is acknowledging that we can change and become the individuals, the people, the nation and the world that God means for us to be. It is as though God is saying to us, “Go for it. Yes, you can and yes, you will. Come back to me. Learn Torah. Straighten out the crookedness of your life and be assured of My love for you!”
Thus assured of God’s love, may we all be blessed with a year of sweetness, goodness, love and peace.
AMEN
Friday, September 11, 2009
9/11 2009, Why is this day different?
I think there is not one person here who does not remember exactly where he or she was when they first heard about 9/11. The trauma of almost 3,000 Americans dying on that day is indeed still with our nation. The number of Americans who died on 9/11 is actually greater than the number who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bin Laden still has not been captured. The six years of war in Iraq has proven to be an unwise and unnecessary diversion from the fight against Al-Qaeda. The threat of international terrorism is still great and, frankly, I find little comfort in the fact that another major attack has not yet occurred.
With all that being said, there are certain things that make this anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy quite different. Allow me to explain.
Approximately 100 days after 9/11, I went to the leaders of the community with a proposal. My proposal was that on the year anniversary of 9/11, there should be a community memorial service. I mentioned to them that this might be done in one of two ways; either a large interfaith memorial service in a place like the Coliseum, or that we could encourage every religious institution to have some sort of commemoration on that day. Subsequently a meeting was held, at which time the response was less than enthusiastic. The neighboring churches said that they planned to ring bells in commemoration of the tragedy, but not much more was to be done and that year there was no community commemoration.
Nevertheless, Temple Emanuel organized a community commemoration of its own on the anniversary of 9/11. We created a wonderful memorial service. Some of the readings for that service are to be found in our service tonight. We lit the two candles like the ones that you see in front of you. We invited the entire Jewish community. Students from the American Hebrew Academy also attended. We parked a police cruiser outside of the entrance to the Temple and at the exact moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, the police cruiser put on its siren. We stood in silence for two minutes to commemorate the moment.
This, by the way, is a memorial custom that comes directly from Israel. In Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day and on the Memorial Day for the Israeli soldiers, an air raid siren goes off and people stand at attention for two minutes.
The entire experience gave me an appreciation of just how wonderful Jewish tradition is in commemorating deaths of loved ones. The idea of saying Kaddish for loved ones on the anniversary of the death apparently has no parallel in Christianity. Here, we very quickly put up a memorial plaque on our Yahrzeit memorial just outside the sanctuary. The plaque reads, “For our brothers and sisters,” with the date September 11, 2001.
After the first year, other than mentioning collectively those who were tragically lost, there was no special commemoration. We lit the plaque on the board and we said Kaddish for the victims. I was rather amazed at the fact that, year after year, including most especially the 5th anniversary of 9/11, there seemed to be very little ceremony for this tragedy in our country. Yes, there were commemorations at the Pentagon, at the Pennsylvania Flight 93 crash site, and at the World Trade Center site. Other than this, there seemed to be little or no local commemorations of the tragedy.
All that was true until this year, it is my impression that this year there is greater awareness of the tragedy of 9/11 than there has been in any year since the first. People are posting on Facebook. Emails are flying across the internet. Words of memorial can be found in many places. A day of service has been planned by many. There is much greater press coverage than in the past.
So the question that I would like to ask is why? What makes this year different from the past years?
I’ve only been able to come up with one answer, and that is that we have a new President. During the time of the Bush presidency, there did not seem to be the same motivation to commemorate this tragedy as there is now. In my opinion, this motivation comes from two sources. First of all, it comes from the left in our country. The left in our country is very much interested in commemorating 9/11 this year in order to make a statement that the left remembers and has confidence that President Obama will be a sufficient steward of the security of the United States.
There was no reason to do this in the aftermath of 9/11 as long as Bush remained as president. People united behind the president during those first few months after the attacks, and expressing their confidence in his ability to defend our nation. But now with President Obama, the left needs to make a new statement.
But there is also a need by the right to make a statement. The right in our country wants to say the following, “During the past eight years, there has been no additional attack on American soil, and this was due to the stewardship of the Republican president.” Now it seems to me, there is a political move afoot that through the increased commemorations of 9/11, doubts about President Obama’s ability to protect America will be increased.
In other words, what we’re seeing is both on the left and the right attempts to politicize today’s commemoration. I have to tell you that from a Jewish point of view if this is true, then we would condemn both approaches. In our opinion, we have been remembering 9/11 every single year because that’s what we as Jews do.
Every single person who died on 9/11 was like a star in the sky whose light continues to shine through the blessing of their memory. Every single person who was murdered that day was unto himself or herself a world complete. Each one of them is mourned by their loving family. Each one of them had hopes and aspirations that were taken away by murderous terrorists. Each one of them was a blessing to those that knew them, and through the good deeds they performed while alive each one of them was a blessing to humanity.
So what does this 9/11 really mean to us today?
It means for us that we as Jews, and we as Americans, should remember – every single year. Politics should not color the shape of our remembrance. It also means that we need now to think about special anniversaries and the way in which we will remember. For example, we’ve had here at Temple Emanuel the discussion that on the 10th anniversary we are going to try to host a large and significant commemoration of this tragedy.
Unfortunately, the second thing that 9/11 means today is that the fight against Al-Qaeda is still not complete. As a matter of fact, the murderous terrorist influence of Al-Qaeda and radical Islam seems to have increased since 2001. Osama bin Laden has not been captured, and the influence of Al-Qaeda is to be felt throughout the world, particularly in the Arab world. We know especially that there are cells of Al-Qaeda in both southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Again, the fact that no attack has occurred on American soil is not one that particularly gives me comfort given the dedication of Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic cells to do harm to American citizens.
The significance of 9/11 is also one that needs to be considered in light of the current efforts of the government of Iran to create a nuclear bomb. Two days ago, the United States’ government announced that Iran now has enough refined uranium to create a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency has indicated that with the current level of centrifuge refinement that Iran could create two nuclear bombs a year. The potential to create numerous bombs is there.
All of this power will soon be in the hands of a government that has sworn to wipe Israel off the map, and to do great harm to the West.
I applaud the attempts of the Obama administration to engage the Iranians in dialogue. Up to now, these attempts have been met without much success. The purpose of such engagement should be to present to the Iranian leaders that they have a choice. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. They face two radically different futures. One is a future where if they give up their nuclear aspirations, they will receive significant aid from the West and will be able to create prosperity for their people. In this vision, the Iranian people, proud of their Persian heritage, will indeed take their place among the community of nations.
Their second option would be to face severe economic sanctions, sanctions which could wipe out their already stressed middle class. In addition to that, there is always the possibility of some sort of military intervention by the United States or Israel or both.
In addition, this engagement could increase the American leverage to draw others into sanctions against Iran in the future. The others that we are speaking of here are particularly Germany, Russia, and China.
Finally, the purpose of engagement could be to serve as a justification to the world in case harsher measures against Iran are needed.
Recent elections in Iran have shown that democracy there is an illusion. Human rights for those that oppose the regime are indeed imperiled. A nuclear Iran would be an absolute nightmare for the United States and the free world. In the midst of all of the attention paid to issues such as the economy and healthcare, we must not forget the issue of Iranian nuclearization – an issue which threatens our country and its allies.
Our Arab allies are no less concerned a nuclear Iran would set off an arms race in that part of the world. The chances of terrorist organizations getting their hands on a nuclear weapon would be much greater. A nuclear Iran would seriously undermine our efforts to achieve a comprehensive Middle-East peace agreement, because it would undermine moderates in the region. Iran would become the bully of the neighborhood as it seeks to exert force over that part of the world.
Our window of opportunity is rapidly closing on this, negotiations cannot be open-ended. Iran cannot “rope-a-dope” the United States.
On September 24, Ahmandinejad will speak at the United Nations. A huge demonstration is planned. The demonstration is sponsored by a coalition of Iranian, Labor, Jewish and other organizations.
This is the month that President Obama has said is the key month. Either Iran comes to the table to seriously negotiate, or other stronger measures will need to be taken. An bill could be introduced into Congress next month entitled the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009. Currently in the House, Congressmen Miller and Coble are co-sponsors of this, as are Senators Hagan and Burr in the Senate.
It is indeed important to remember this new threat on this commemoration of September 11th, 2009. The potential for mass murder is indeed greater at this juncture than in recent memory, because of activities of the Iranian government.
This is the weekend in which we read from a passage from Deuteronomy that begins, “We are standing here this day,” at the end of the passage we are encouraged to choose life so that we and our children may indeed be blessed. The text says that God has given us the choice between good and evil, the choice between life and death.
The events of 9/11 and its aftermath present us with the same choice. We must, as a country, choose to remember those who died. We must avoid politicizing this tragedy by means of internal American politics. We must as a country and as the free world find a legitimate way to effectively combat the threats of mass murder that still exist.
We must not hide our heads in the sand or pat ourselves on the back because no additional attack has occurred.
We must above all be those who choose life by not only protecting our security, but also by loving God and witnessing to humanity that God wants us to love one another. May we be blessed to see the fulfillment of the vision of the Prophet Isaiah who wrote, “Nations shall not live to up sword against nation.”
May this be not only our vision, but our blessing for the United States and for the world.
Bin Laden still has not been captured. The six years of war in Iraq has proven to be an unwise and unnecessary diversion from the fight against Al-Qaeda. The threat of international terrorism is still great and, frankly, I find little comfort in the fact that another major attack has not yet occurred.
With all that being said, there are certain things that make this anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy quite different. Allow me to explain.
Approximately 100 days after 9/11, I went to the leaders of the community with a proposal. My proposal was that on the year anniversary of 9/11, there should be a community memorial service. I mentioned to them that this might be done in one of two ways; either a large interfaith memorial service in a place like the Coliseum, or that we could encourage every religious institution to have some sort of commemoration on that day. Subsequently a meeting was held, at which time the response was less than enthusiastic. The neighboring churches said that they planned to ring bells in commemoration of the tragedy, but not much more was to be done and that year there was no community commemoration.
Nevertheless, Temple Emanuel organized a community commemoration of its own on the anniversary of 9/11. We created a wonderful memorial service. Some of the readings for that service are to be found in our service tonight. We lit the two candles like the ones that you see in front of you. We invited the entire Jewish community. Students from the American Hebrew Academy also attended. We parked a police cruiser outside of the entrance to the Temple and at the exact moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, the police cruiser put on its siren. We stood in silence for two minutes to commemorate the moment.
This, by the way, is a memorial custom that comes directly from Israel. In Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day and on the Memorial Day for the Israeli soldiers, an air raid siren goes off and people stand at attention for two minutes.
The entire experience gave me an appreciation of just how wonderful Jewish tradition is in commemorating deaths of loved ones. The idea of saying Kaddish for loved ones on the anniversary of the death apparently has no parallel in Christianity. Here, we very quickly put up a memorial plaque on our Yahrzeit memorial just outside the sanctuary. The plaque reads, “For our brothers and sisters,” with the date September 11, 2001.
After the first year, other than mentioning collectively those who were tragically lost, there was no special commemoration. We lit the plaque on the board and we said Kaddish for the victims. I was rather amazed at the fact that, year after year, including most especially the 5th anniversary of 9/11, there seemed to be very little ceremony for this tragedy in our country. Yes, there were commemorations at the Pentagon, at the Pennsylvania Flight 93 crash site, and at the World Trade Center site. Other than this, there seemed to be little or no local commemorations of the tragedy.
All that was true until this year, it is my impression that this year there is greater awareness of the tragedy of 9/11 than there has been in any year since the first. People are posting on Facebook. Emails are flying across the internet. Words of memorial can be found in many places. A day of service has been planned by many. There is much greater press coverage than in the past.
So the question that I would like to ask is why? What makes this year different from the past years?
I’ve only been able to come up with one answer, and that is that we have a new President. During the time of the Bush presidency, there did not seem to be the same motivation to commemorate this tragedy as there is now. In my opinion, this motivation comes from two sources. First of all, it comes from the left in our country. The left in our country is very much interested in commemorating 9/11 this year in order to make a statement that the left remembers and has confidence that President Obama will be a sufficient steward of the security of the United States.
There was no reason to do this in the aftermath of 9/11 as long as Bush remained as president. People united behind the president during those first few months after the attacks, and expressing their confidence in his ability to defend our nation. But now with President Obama, the left needs to make a new statement.
But there is also a need by the right to make a statement. The right in our country wants to say the following, “During the past eight years, there has been no additional attack on American soil, and this was due to the stewardship of the Republican president.” Now it seems to me, there is a political move afoot that through the increased commemorations of 9/11, doubts about President Obama’s ability to protect America will be increased.
In other words, what we’re seeing is both on the left and the right attempts to politicize today’s commemoration. I have to tell you that from a Jewish point of view if this is true, then we would condemn both approaches. In our opinion, we have been remembering 9/11 every single year because that’s what we as Jews do.
Every single person who died on 9/11 was like a star in the sky whose light continues to shine through the blessing of their memory. Every single person who was murdered that day was unto himself or herself a world complete. Each one of them is mourned by their loving family. Each one of them had hopes and aspirations that were taken away by murderous terrorists. Each one of them was a blessing to those that knew them, and through the good deeds they performed while alive each one of them was a blessing to humanity.
So what does this 9/11 really mean to us today?
It means for us that we as Jews, and we as Americans, should remember – every single year. Politics should not color the shape of our remembrance. It also means that we need now to think about special anniversaries and the way in which we will remember. For example, we’ve had here at Temple Emanuel the discussion that on the 10th anniversary we are going to try to host a large and significant commemoration of this tragedy.
Unfortunately, the second thing that 9/11 means today is that the fight against Al-Qaeda is still not complete. As a matter of fact, the murderous terrorist influence of Al-Qaeda and radical Islam seems to have increased since 2001. Osama bin Laden has not been captured, and the influence of Al-Qaeda is to be felt throughout the world, particularly in the Arab world. We know especially that there are cells of Al-Qaeda in both southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Again, the fact that no attack has occurred on American soil is not one that particularly gives me comfort given the dedication of Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic cells to do harm to American citizens.
The significance of 9/11 is also one that needs to be considered in light of the current efforts of the government of Iran to create a nuclear bomb. Two days ago, the United States’ government announced that Iran now has enough refined uranium to create a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency has indicated that with the current level of centrifuge refinement that Iran could create two nuclear bombs a year. The potential to create numerous bombs is there.
All of this power will soon be in the hands of a government that has sworn to wipe Israel off the map, and to do great harm to the West.
I applaud the attempts of the Obama administration to engage the Iranians in dialogue. Up to now, these attempts have been met without much success. The purpose of such engagement should be to present to the Iranian leaders that they have a choice. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. They face two radically different futures. One is a future where if they give up their nuclear aspirations, they will receive significant aid from the West and will be able to create prosperity for their people. In this vision, the Iranian people, proud of their Persian heritage, will indeed take their place among the community of nations.
Their second option would be to face severe economic sanctions, sanctions which could wipe out their already stressed middle class. In addition to that, there is always the possibility of some sort of military intervention by the United States or Israel or both.
In addition, this engagement could increase the American leverage to draw others into sanctions against Iran in the future. The others that we are speaking of here are particularly Germany, Russia, and China.
Finally, the purpose of engagement could be to serve as a justification to the world in case harsher measures against Iran are needed.
Recent elections in Iran have shown that democracy there is an illusion. Human rights for those that oppose the regime are indeed imperiled. A nuclear Iran would be an absolute nightmare for the United States and the free world. In the midst of all of the attention paid to issues such as the economy and healthcare, we must not forget the issue of Iranian nuclearization – an issue which threatens our country and its allies.
Our Arab allies are no less concerned a nuclear Iran would set off an arms race in that part of the world. The chances of terrorist organizations getting their hands on a nuclear weapon would be much greater. A nuclear Iran would seriously undermine our efforts to achieve a comprehensive Middle-East peace agreement, because it would undermine moderates in the region. Iran would become the bully of the neighborhood as it seeks to exert force over that part of the world.
Our window of opportunity is rapidly closing on this, negotiations cannot be open-ended. Iran cannot “rope-a-dope” the United States.
On September 24, Ahmandinejad will speak at the United Nations. A huge demonstration is planned. The demonstration is sponsored by a coalition of Iranian, Labor, Jewish and other organizations.
This is the month that President Obama has said is the key month. Either Iran comes to the table to seriously negotiate, or other stronger measures will need to be taken. An bill could be introduced into Congress next month entitled the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009. Currently in the House, Congressmen Miller and Coble are co-sponsors of this, as are Senators Hagan and Burr in the Senate.
It is indeed important to remember this new threat on this commemoration of September 11th, 2009. The potential for mass murder is indeed greater at this juncture than in recent memory, because of activities of the Iranian government.
This is the weekend in which we read from a passage from Deuteronomy that begins, “We are standing here this day,” at the end of the passage we are encouraged to choose life so that we and our children may indeed be blessed. The text says that God has given us the choice between good and evil, the choice between life and death.
The events of 9/11 and its aftermath present us with the same choice. We must, as a country, choose to remember those who died. We must avoid politicizing this tragedy by means of internal American politics. We must as a country and as the free world find a legitimate way to effectively combat the threats of mass murder that still exist.
We must not hide our heads in the sand or pat ourselves on the back because no additional attack has occurred.
We must above all be those who choose life by not only protecting our security, but also by loving God and witnessing to humanity that God wants us to love one another. May we be blessed to see the fulfillment of the vision of the Prophet Isaiah who wrote, “Nations shall not live to up sword against nation.”
May this be not only our vision, but our blessing for the United States and for the world.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Repeal Prop 8 video
The following is an unusual video calling for the repeal of Proposition 8 in California. The video presents an interesting historical perspective. The background music is from the Christian hymn "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) as sung by Rufus Wainwright. If you like this as much as I do, please feel free to pass this link along to others.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjHHklgnbXQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjHHklgnbXQ
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