Ruminations

Have any of us not encountered someone espousing vicarious anger over a minority group for not acting or looking like “normal” Americans? Have any of us not heard someone complain about Asian-Americans’ choice to live in Chinatowns or K-Towns? Or someone complain about Latin-Americans’ use of Spanish? Or about particular linguistic habits, Ebonics and naming-customs, of many in the black community? Or about the clothing choices and head coverings of American Sikhs and Muslims?

We should hear Haman’s voice in all such complaints: “There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples who keep themselves separate.”

No person—on the basis of their race or their religion, their place of birth or their citizenship status, their sex or their gender or their sexual orientation—no person should have their culture made lesser in their eyes, demeaned, on the basis of bigotry, of racism, of intolerance. The Jewish tradition teaches us that darkhei shalom, literally “ways of peace,” are important. This tradition holds that peaceful coexistence with people different than ourselves is of paramount importance.

In light of this year’s ongoing and unpredictable winter weather, I cannot help but think of one of my favorite, quirky talmudic stories.

The Babylonian Talmud tells of an especially troubling time of drought in Jerusalem. The Rabbis had been unsuccessful in praying for rain, so they sent for a man who was known to have special powers, Honi ha-Me’aggel, “Honi the Circle-Drawer.” The scene begins when they first ask Honi to pray for rain…

Both King and Chapin grappled with the reality that the world sorely needed people with different cultures to collaborate for it to improve. Our tradition, likewise, recognizes this. It is in our Mishnah that we learn the reason some believe God created the world with just one person: not only to teach us, as is commonly cited in Jewish circles, that “anyone who destroys one life is considered as though he destroys an entire world, and anyone who saves one life is like he saves the entire world,” but also to teach that “no person [should] say to his fellow, ‘my ancestors are greater than yours.’”

Liminality—though some consider this word needless jargon, I suspect it nevertheless is a favorite of many rabbis (though Rabbi Chessin prefers “bifurcation!”) This densely descriptive term is one that people who study religion love to love, because it enables them to name an important type of experience that crosses boundaries of culture, time, and place. But what does it mean, and what is it all about? Perhaps more i importantly, allow me to answer: Why should you care about noticing the liminal?

Proof of the importance of the JCRC’s work could never have been clearer than in November, specifically in the aftermath of the deadliest-ever incident of anti-Semitism in US history. At vigils hastily organized around the United States, nearly 100,000 people—including countless non-Jews— defiantly assembled to rebuff anti-Jewish hate. In Dayton, when our community gathered at Temple Israel, we numbered approximately 1,300—in a city that claims only to have a total Jewish population of 4,000. In addition to that, members of the Muslim American community quickly managed to raise in excess of $150,000, via crowdfunding, to help support the victims of the shooting.

I have debated with Israeli relatives how one can believe in God in a post-Holocaust world. As far as they are concerned, any God who would allow the Holocaust to occur is no God worth believing in. Best cast scenario, they would suggest, is that no God exists at all.

Hanukkah is, at its core, a Jewish attempt to reconcile theological crises like this.

If we hide our Jewishness, we risk making those of other minorities—those who don’t have the luxury of just, so to speak, “hiding the hanukkiah”—feel even more alienated in an increasingly hostile world.

We are here, together—Jews and non-Jews—to proclaim that we will not have our names, our identities as Jews or Christians, as people of any kind, any faith, any ethnicity, or any persuasion, used as bywords in the commission of violence that desecrates our God and our world.

In the wake of the national spectacle that was last month’s confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there have been many people around the country who have wondered if the #metoo movement should now be considered dead…

On Sunday, September 23rd, we began another exciting year of Makor at Temple Beth Or! Our first day was action-packed, and it was lovely to see parents and children who had not been together for much of the summer reunite. It also was wonderful to have our “campOrs” (what I call our students) have an opportunity to meet their new teachers for the year.

Most Jews are aware of two new years we celebrate per calendar year: Rosh Hashanah in the fall and the secular new year, on January 1st, in the winter. Knowledgeable Jews may also note that there is a third new year that comes each spring—Tu BiShevat—which marks the new year for trees. How many of you, though, knew that Judaism actually suggests that we mark fournew years (not including January 1st)?

The New Year in Judaism—and, by extension, the entire period of the High Holidays—gives us an opportunity to refresh ourselves. If we follow the “process,” the rituals, associated with this time of year, we too—like God after creating the world—can feel as though we are renewed, “ensouled.” As with God after the creation, we after the High Holidays can feel refreshed, as though we’ve just woken from a perfectly restful night of sleep. We can enter the year fifty-seven-seventy-nine with the wisdom and experience that come from five-thousand-seven-hundred-and-seventy-nine years of life, but, simultaneously, with the youthful optimism, vigor, and thirst for discovery that come from having only experienced creation yesterday.

“Tuvia’s mother was wailing and tearing her hair. His father was sobbing. His sisters were terrified. ‘Tuvia, my dear son,’ his mother cried. ‘My only boy, why are they tearing you away from me?’

Tuvia was taken, half-asleep, to a large house where many frightened, wide-eyed children were crying, ‘Mama, Mama. Take me home to my Mama!’ The children cried all that sleepless night.”

Larry Domnitch, The Cantonists: The Jewish Children’s Army of the Tsar, 79-80. Minor edits made for style.

Joseph Trumpeldor, who died in 1920 defending a Jewish settlement in the Galilee and was one of the great Zionist heroes of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, classically is known as the man whose final words were: “tov lamut be’ad artzeinu,” “it is good to die for our land.” These words became a rallying cry for generations of Israel’s defenders. The only problem? Modern critical historians increasingly question whether Trumpeldor actually said this, even suggesting that—if he uttered them at all—he may have meant the opposite!

Much as I love Makor and am a little sad to see it end each year—and I really, really do and am—even I must confess that I love the freedom and rest that a summer break provides. Though I’ll be sad to say goodbye to Makor for a few months, I will greatly appreciate getting a little more sleep each Sunday morning!

My own personal feelings about this imminent break notwithstanding, it is worth us recognizing how un-Jewish the idea of a summer break is….

We live in a post-1948 world, 70 years after the creation of the modern State of Israel, where the conflict between Israel and her neighbors—most of whom are majority-Muslim—has been acrimonious and public. The bitter fruit of this decades-long, bloody conflict has been the deterioration of a once-healthy relationship between Muslims and Jews.

The teachings of the first Rabbis, recorded in the Mishnah, suggest that mi-she-nichnas av, m’ma-atin b’simchah; or: “Once Av begins, we diminish celebration.” Several centuries later, Rabbi Yehudah (son of Rabbi Samuel bar Sheilat) coined the more famous corollary to this phrase: Mi-she-nichnas adar, marbin b’simchah; or: “Once Adar begins, we multiply celebration.”

With the PyeonChang Olympics approaching, a certain element of this year’s lead-up to the Games has me thinking of a major highlight from the 1980 Winter Olympics: The so-called Miracle on Ice.

Though it might seem like tzedakah is one of the simplest ideas in Judaism—so basic that any explanation would be unnecessary—it still is worth refreshing our understanding of what this word truly means and to remind ourselves of its importance. The term itself is liable to be confusing. Though people often translate it as charity—and though there is some overlap in meaning—tzedakah invokes an ideal far more expansive than the English “charity” might suggest.