Dor Deah

Saturday February 17 2018 – Shabbat Terumah

The choreography of pain and outrage is by now familiar.  Even in the early hours of Wednesday evening before our fears were realized,  all over the social media the usual stances were taken, the charges and castigation.  I don’t participate – I don’t see the point in responding to these events by shaming each other.  But many did not hold back, driven by anger that is completely understandable.  I apologize for the indirect use of profanity but I think people need to be aware of the terms through which the debate is being conducted. Several friends, and not a few rabbis wrote on their social media accounts  “F— Your Thoughts and Prayers – Your prayers without action are an abomination to God – He doesn’t want them.”  This seems to be a popular sentiment.

I make no apology for praying. I make no apology for turning to the words of our tradition, to our wisdom from ages past when it is dark outside my house.  And I make no apology for suggesting that we honor each other in our conduct towards one another and not only when we are in agreement.  As Jews we believe that the souls of the departed are judged by the conduct of those left behind – that’s why we say Kaddish. Our words and conduct should be to the honor of the innocents who were cruelly killed.

Many of us have spent since Wednesday in a daze, attending to what we need to but with our concentration elsewhere.  Passages of psalms and scripture pass through the head, wishing comfort for families who are going through suffering we don’t even like to imagine while feeling ourselves bereft of a sense of security.  I think many of my colleagues at once turned to a single powerful and terrible text.  The spread of trauma from a high school in Florida across a country of millions is described powerfully in a modern psalm, the well-known and devastating poem by Yehuda Amichi – The Diameter of the Bomb.  

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

And the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,

With four dead and eleven wounded.

The clinical beginning of the poem describes our fascination for details, we can’t turn away from explanation when even exposure to the terrible news is traumatizing.  We look fervently for the explanation, for any small detail that is going to place us outside The Diameter of the Bomb.  “Tell me this won’t be us.”  “Tell me this can’t be us.”  But we cannot escape the bomb’s circumference.  

And around these, in a larger circle

 Of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered

And one graveyard. But the young woman

Who was buried in the city she came from,

At a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,

Enlarges the circle considerably,

And the solitary man mourning her death

At the distant shores of a country far across the sea

Includes the entire world in the circle.

Florida is not that far away.  A colleague of mine buried one of the victims yesterday.  He sat with the parents of a girl that was killed as they clung to hope – until there was no hope.  Another classmate stayed up all of Wednesday night with survivors and rescuers.  They will never be the same for what they have seen.  Most of us probably knows someone who knows someone at the center of the circle.  A woman who survived the massacre of students at Virginia Tech in 2007 wrote very movingly in the Washington post of what it is like to be a survivor of such an attack, the way in which the trauma bleeds into every aspect of life.  She never feels safe.  Hundreds have been killed in the acts of violence since Columbine in 1999, thousands and thousands more walk through the world with scars not everyone can see.  The circle emcompasses everything.

And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans

That reaches up to the throne of God and

Beyond, making

A circle with no end and no God.

It is impossible to isolate religious life from the fact of suffering.   Our prayers are not a retreat, our attempts to place what we know into our relationship with God and our history are not reassuring speculation.   Everytime we stand to pray we have to come to terms with our vulnerability and fear and we do not come to synagogue to excuse God.  God doesn’t want lies, and we dare not lie in our prayers – not to heaven nor to ourselves about the circle of grief that engulfs, about the suffering that we dare not close our eyes to.  But pray we must.  Not because prayer substitutes for action or excuses indifference, but because as Jews we do not believe that we can evade the requirement to stand before God, to organize our souls, and to express our thoughts, our wants and our fears in the words and texts of our traditions.  This is what Jews do.

On this last Thursday and Friday religious Jews celebrated Rosh Chodesh (the beginning of the New Month).  As part of the less modern psalms for Rosh Chodesh we recite the line Lo HaMetim Yehalluyah – “The Dead do not praise the Lord.”  What a terrible thing to think, much less proclaim after Wednesday horrible killings.  There are people who think that the point of religious life is to offer refreshing bromides for the weak in spirit, to give a little reassurance so that the mentally timid don’t fear death so much.  With due respect, they don’t know our tradition.  To say such a line rips our souls apart when we think of the children and their teachers who have been silenced.  We pray not for relief or to escape but to articulate our brokenness, and to turn with determination toward our responsibility to speak for those who no longer can.

 Prayer and study are the moments when we put the broken parts of our souls together – where the man who broke into tears at Planet Fitness watching the news meets the Dad who feels more blessed than anything for just one more Friday night dinner with his family.  “God I am grateful.”  “God I am angry.”  “God I am scared.”  As Jews, we seek to order everything that we are and need to be when we stand before God three times a day.

I do believe that these shootings show a great brokenness in our society.  I think that more children are hurting today, and hurting in ways that were not even possible when I was young.  Our youth are subject to tremendous pressure to achieve, to relentless social sorting, and to enduring forms of stigmatization that did not exist 30 years ago.  I cannot control our nation’s gun policy, but I can be kinder than necessary.  There were troubled children in my town growing up – they did not as far as I know have the opportunity to purchase military-style rifles, smoke bombs and gas masks.  That a 19 year-old with an extensive history of trouble could gather for himself an arsenal does not seem right – and it seems to me this is something that can and must be addressed.  The security needs of schools and of our synagogue need to carefully considered, given the ready access to weapons and anger.  I pray that as we address the causes of the extreme alienation that our children experience, and our responsibility to ensure their safety that we turn to each other with love, recognizing the vulnerability that each of us carry as creatures that walk within the circle, as people who live within the Diameter of the Bomb.

Remarks On the Observance of Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday

Sermon Delivered Saturday January 20 2018

When we share meals with religious Christians we are reminded of one of the ways that we are different from our neighbors; where Christians have their main mealtime prayer before the food is served we have our major mealtime prayer after the dessert plates have been cleared.  Our practice is rooted in a deep theological statement, and that is the recognition that being satiated with food is a spiritually dangerous moment.  As it says in the book of Devarim, where we learn the commandment of saying the Grace After Meals:

You will say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”

When we are full, when we are prosperous, when we are satisfied the temptation is always going to arise to believe that we deserve it.  The tradition therefore provides us with reminders that we are not the creator of the good things we enjoy and our satisfaction needs to be tempered with humility.  

We say the rather long Grace After Meals because we need to hear every time we eat that even if we spend our lives working our butts off (and we should!), we are not going to earn the great blessings that we have just because of the accident of where we ended up, whether we were born here or if our families migrated here.  We don’t live in  (beautiful!) Bangor and other people live in less fortunate circumstances because we are better, more deserving people.  Our lives could be much different.  We like our heritage as Jews a lot and it is appropriate to celebrate it.  On one of our Wednesday morning sessions at Bagel Central, we spoke about the power of just being a so-called cultural Jew.  Everyone seems to be angry with the cultural Jews!  But when one does it right – learning and speaking our language and knowing our rich and diverse history -being a cultural Jew can be pretty powerful.  It’s a fantastic inheritance!  However, we didn’t make any of it, in most cases if things go well it is our lot to humbly pass it on with maybe a little of our modest contribution.  We rightly love our people and our culture, but it isn’t our creation and one of the most powerful parts of it is that it calls us to regularly confess that we didn’t do much to deserve it.

The same is of course true of being an American.  We should prize our history highly, cherish and protect it.  I don’t believe that the Torah comes as voting guide or as a legislative blueprint – God gives us brains and hearts and wants us to figure it out.  On issues such as immigration,, Jews can and will disagree about the best course while all the time remaining in the camp of Torah.  God is too often invoked as a referee – working it out is our task.  I don’t agree with all of the prescriptions that are presented as flowing from Judaism under this issue.   We are allowed, I believe, under Judaism, to have nations, we are allowed to have borders, we are allowed to have laws and enforce them, we are allowed to place the welfare of citizens over non-citizens.  But we are not allowed to believe that we are more deserving than other peoples and we are not permitted to degrade other peoples. That the rich and powerful would crudely insult the poor for their poverty is an affront to heaven.  The reported remarks of the President regarding our responsibilities towards people trapped in impoverished and corrupt countries are beneath the dignity of his office, and require repudiation.   

Martin Luther King Jr, whose birthday we recognize this Monday, was known for saying, “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”  There are great issues on which people will continue to disagree, there will be competing visions and plans, and there is no reason to not have energetic and sometimes emotional arguments about the best course.  This is how things work are worked out in a republic, and no one should be made to apologize for having a different opinion or being in the minority on a given issue.  Groupthink is a problem in many circles, including those where people wear kippot and speak in Hebrew.  The different ships we arrive on are figurative as well as literal, and we are enriched by different ideas as much as by different languages and cultures.  But Dr. King, along with our tradition, reminds us that in all this we are required to remember our common, vulnerable nature.  We cannot believe that we deserve all of our good fortune, and our interactions and policies towards people who do not have as much need to acknowledge this simple fact.  The correct assessment of our nature and the teaching of our precious tradition direct us to conduct ourselves with correct humility, and to live with hearts that are open to the less fortunate.  May Dr. King’s words and example endure as a blessing.  

“The world is divided into two types of people. The first type of person repeats himself again and again, each time saying the same thing. The second type are those who don’t have anything to say.”

         –  R. Menachem Froman (translated by R. Alan Brill)

In the Jewish press this time of year there are many stories about the trials of rabbis as the High Holidays approach – trying to figure out what to say and how to say it.  These are alleged to be the most difficult sermons of the year as we try to think of something new to say.   Maybe.  I have a different theory about why rabbis find this holiday so hard, and that is that the feedback is not as obvious.  A seder with people singing and eating matzah is a good seder.  A sukkah that doesn’t fall down in the wind is a good sukkah.  On Purim if people are shaking the groggers all is well.  What does a good Rosh Hashana look like?  Everything is on the inside.  You can look at people a long time and not see if they are repenting or not.  So if you see me staring intently at you while you are trying to pray . . .

There is a learning curve to being a rabbi, there is a learning curve in Jewish life, there is a learning curve in life itself.  Year after year we go through the calendar.  I don’t think I do Passover better with each year.  Years ago I would read the Haggadah intently weeks before we “go live”, looking for that new insight, the new hiddush.  Then I had kids.  I make my own matzah every year and I think that I get better at that each year, but the real growth for Pesach each year is now watching my children.  Purim too, I don’t feel like I do Purim better year after year, though I do feel increasingly exhausted when everything is done.  

The fall holidays, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, I do feel as though I do better at them each year.  Not because I think of something new to say, even as I struggle to frame things better, and look for some good laugh lines.  But every year I learn to savour life more.  I spend more time looking at the trees and water.  As time passes, I find myself learning to be more generous with others – to see them as caught-up in the same struggles and drama that have ensnared me.  I learn more each year how the things that seem big are not so important, and the small things are the most precious things that we have.  Every year I am a little easier with myself.  Each Rosh Hashana is more real than the one that came before.

At the beginning of his treatise on the laws of prayer, before he states the order of the daily liturgy – where to stand and what to say, Maimonides defines the essence of prayer for Jews:  It is simply to say the praises of the Creator, to state our needs and give thanks for what we have.  Given this rather tersely stated mandate, the procedures of the next few days might seem unduly long and involved.  It is clear to us on these days more than any others that Jews are indeed, in the language of Rabbi Froman, the type of people who  say the same thing over and over.  We say words that are written deep within us.  The liturgy is long, and we deploy specialized personnel and props that only come out once a year.  Chazzan Bill Slott, it is good to hear your voice again.  Thank you for sharing your inspiration with us.  All of it, the books, the rabbis, the chazzan, the shofars are all deployed to help us say a short and simple prayer, and to have that prayer echo through our lives over the year.  That prayer is, “Thank you God for the gift of our lives, and please God, one more year.”  Not new and not too long.  But it takes work to be able to say it the way it needs to be said.  It is this short prayer that I feel I am better at as the years go by.

May our words, our song, our sounding of the shofar bring each of us to the place that we need to be on these days.  May the beauty of the world around us inspire us to thank God for our vitality and pray for continued strength.  May our words, though not new, carry us into the year with determination.  “Thank you God for the gift of our lives, and please God, one more year.”

שנה טובה ומתוקה

Oh Zion!  Surely you will ask after the well-being of your captives

Ones who seek your well-being and are the remnant of your flock

From West, East, North and South, promote the peace of near and far

As well as those bound by longing

Shedding tears like the dew on Mount Hermon

Wishing to shed them on your mountains

These are the words of Yehudah Ha-Levi, the great poet and philosopher of 12th century Spain.  It is taken from the collection of elegies, called in Hebrew Qinot, that we recite during the morning service of the Ninth of Av.  It is at the turn of the summer that we gather as a people to cry and moan for the afflictions we have suffered as a people.  We read in somber notes from our literature of suffering beginning with the catastrophe of Babylonian destruction and exile, traveling through the terrors of Roman rule, Crusade and Inquisition, and the night of the Holocaust.  It is a searing day.  

So why do it?  Because, it is a day of great strength. There is no more determined sound than when we rise at the end of our lamentations to chant Eli Zion.  It is not an expression of victory but of survival, and in the face of everything we have faced in history our survival is the greatest miracle imaginable.  That we still stand is testament to our ongoing purpose, the great need of repair that explains why 2500 years after the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon we are yet counted among the nations.

It is also a great day of unity.  R. Soloveitchik notes in his commentary that Ha-Levi’s poem starts “Oh Zion!  Surely you will ask after the well-being of your captives!” – implying that whatever worldly power holds us we are ultimately captives of Zion.  Throughout geography and history Jews are held together under our longing for the Land.  While in bad times we lament, and in good times we celebrate – our connection to Zion is the glue that holds all Jews together.  Though at times we feel the tie fray, our emotional attachment to the Land of Israel unites Jews across cultures and generations.

We are fortunate to live in a time when the Land is open to us, and we have witnessed great growth and beginning.  Rabbi Lerner and I will be leading a joint congregational trip to Israel in late April 2017, and I hope that many will be able to come along.   The fast for the Ninth of Av will begin in the evening of August 13 and continue on the morning of August 14.  I hope here too, that you will consider sitting in mourning and rising in defiance with us.  May the bounds of longing bind, bringing us together to shed tears of grief and joy.

L’Shalom

Rabbi Bill Siemers

הלכות קדוש החדש. מצות עשה אחת והיא לחשב ולידע ולקבוע באיזה יום הוא תחלת כל חדש וחדש מחדשי השנה. וביאור מצוה זו בפרקים אלו.

The Laws of the Sanctification of the Month

There is a single mitzvah in this category and it is to calculate, to know, and to determine which day is the beginning of each and every month of the year.  This mitzvah will be explained in the following chapters.

Part of the problem with trying to describe “the essence of Judaism” is that it keeps changing.  As rabbis, we find ourselves from time to time having to say stuff like “As Jews we have always believed . . .” because people expect that there should be stuff that we have always believed and that someone should be able to tell them what it is.  When parents are confronted by their children with the demands to explain why we have to be different than everyone else they want to have a brief, true and effective answer.  People become very impatient with hearing over and over how complicated things are.

Well, some things are complicated, but even when they aren’t it’s a special weakness of Jews or at least rabbis to like these complicated things.  One of my favorite portraits of this widespread desire among rabbis/intellectuals for the interesting and of its usually destructive outcomes of this drive is in Borges’ Death and the Compass:

“There’s no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs,” Treviranus was saying as he brandished an imperious cigar. “We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee is the possessor of the finest sapphires in the world. Someone, intending to steal them, came in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the robber had to kill him. What do you think?”

“It’s possible, but not interesting,” Lonnrot answered. “You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.”

Treviranus answered ill-humoredly: “I am not interested in rabbinical explanations; I am interested in the capture of the man who stabbed this unknown person.”

You will want to read the whole thing.  The essence of the story is that intellectuals desire complexity even as it lures them to a bad end.  And rabbis desire complexity even when it undermines the institutions we serve.  For all of the talk about the need for nuance and shades of grey, the successful transmission of culture depends on the ability to give comprehensible and mostly uncomplicated answers.  To explain why we are going to study Hebrew instead of playing soccer, parents need a no-shades-of-gray answer and they correctly look to religious leaders to help them in formulating what they are going to say.  But for people who live within the bubble, the complexity is tolerable because we are devoted to making sense of disparate positions or are strangely empowered by the tension of living between strong and unreconciled claims.  Which is good for us, but we shouldn’t act so hurt and surprised when other people decide that they would rather take up yoga.

Having said all that, I can’t resist the complications.  I wrote yesterday about the my interest in this chapter of halacha as part of an assault on NOMA (non overlapping magisteria or the idea that science gets to do the natural world and religion gets to stick to morals), and indeed according to this introduction it is a commandment for Jews to do some mathematics – we have to calculate the day on which the new month falls.  So this is a challenge to the idea that we should partition ourselves into scientific and religious personalities.

But there are also very interesting incoherences that have to be navigating.  As I wrote above, the problem with describing something as the essence of Judaism is that the essence of Judaism keeps changing.  We see this in the case of the calendar, where an worldview of Judaism emerges in history displacing another competing system and then has to retreat.  And it has to do the the strange requirement to calculate the calendar.  Which will have to wait for another post.