Rosh HaShanah Day One - October 3, 2024

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

So begins Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina.

This quotation can be an apt description of the Jewish people.  For the image with which we Jews prefer to draw ourselves is an extended family, unlike for example, Christianity which sees itself as a community of believers.   And families disagree but continue to love each other.  What is our unique form of unhappiness?

What I am going to suggest, is something that will make some members of the congregation ecstatic.  I blame Pesah, I would like to remove Pesah from the Jewish calendar. It causes too much unhappiness.  What do I mean?  What is the message of Pesah?  Is it that God saved the Jewish people thereby creating this special nation that is bound together and to God through the Covenant at Mt. Sinai?  Or is the message of Pesah that any form of human oppression is wrong, that we are all equal in the eyes of God and therefore to paraphrase the words of the Jewish anti-Zionists “Never again means never again for anybody”?  Does Pesah lead us to a greater particularist concern, focusing on the uniqueness of the Jewish people or direct us to appreciate universalist goals?  It is very confusing and choosing one message over the other is what causes much of the dissension in the Jewish world.

Noah Feldman in his book To be A Jew Today redefines modern Jewish typologies.  For Traditionalists, Jewish law and tradition is morality and thus if a stress is brought to the system via modern mores, Jewish teachings prevail even when the Traditionalist is aware that modern ethical standards are fair and reasonable.   Then there are the Progressives, the Social Justice Jews, those who gently leave aside aspects of the tradition that cannot be reconciled with their deepest moral commitments. And there are those in between, which he calls the Evolutionists, who want to acknowledge the ultimate authority of Jewish tradition while simultaneously seeking to accommodate liberal beliefs.  And finally, the Godless Jews who while not believing in a transcendent supernatural God do so in a way that constitutes the full manifestation of their Jewishness.

The signal tension between these types of Jews is where they stand on the spectrum between Particularism and Universalism. 

In a recent post on my Five Minutes of Torah From Sinai a midrash compared the children of Israel to a group of reeds that cannot be broken in a single stroke and when Israel is united, we merit God to be our Divine protector, but any individual reed could be torn even by a child.  Yet when have we Jews been united? In the rabbinic period, there were sharp divergences of practice and the place of the Temple in Jewish life.  In the Medieval period there were fights between Jewish philosophers, who studied universal teachings, and anti-philosophers who spurned non-Jewish teachings.  Later there were vicious arguments between the Misnagdim, who valued strict Talmud Torah, and the Hasidim, who focused more on internal spiritual development, something that could be valued by any human being. Throughout our history there has been tension between a Jewishness that focuses inward on separateness from the world and a Jewishness that embraces the world.  But where do we embrace each other?

Feldman finds it in the story of Jacob right before he meets Esau his brother, from whom he has been estranged for 20 years.  Knowing that his brother and a large force are coming to meet him, but not knowing if they mean harm, he protects his family by sending them under cover of darkness across the river and he remains alone.  In that lonely night, a mysterious stranger attacks him.  When the day breaks and the stranger must exit, we learn he is an angelic being who bestows a new name on Jacob. Said the angel, “What is your name?” He replied, “Jacob.”  “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and prevailed.” 

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The verb sarita only appears twice in the Bible and both times in relation to Jacob and this fight with the divine being.  The Prophet Hosea recalls this incident, saying,  “He strove (sarah) with an angel and prevailed—The other had to weep and implore him. He found him in Beth El, There he speaks to us.”

For Feldman, to be a Jew is to be a community that struggles with God and fellow human beings and embraces each other as well. In the narrative that follows this incident with the angel, Jacob and the family confront Esau, his brother.  But instead of fighting, they embrace and weep.  The two, who shared the same womb together, who have fought for dominance, both succeeding in their own ways, have now come to recognize each other’s unique humanity.  There is hope for fellowship. 

Another sarah is prominent in our morning’s Torah portion.  Her very name reflects a life of struggle and strife.  This is Sarah Imeinu, led by Abraham her husband to an unknown land and culture, pretending he is not her husband to survive, barren within a culture in which having children was the principal element of pride for a woman, humbly offering her handmaiden to Abraham so that he might provide an heir for this new God. How much suffering did she endure to be part of this new people? But then the joy of a miracle birth in old age only to have to deal with her own trial of competing with the mother of Abraham’s first born and the shocking revelation that this God would insist on her child’s sacrifice.  Her entire life was toiling and grappling.  And yet given that she never wavered in her loyalty and support for Abraham and raising her son to be the next generation of followers of Hashem Elokim, her love for both had to be all encompassing.

Noah Feldman concludes, “To see what can make being Jewish appealing, it is enough to acknowledge that there are some types of people who could find it meaningful to struggle with God and embrace God; to struggle with one another, embrace one another, in that same struggle embrace. We have a name for those people: those people are Jews.”

In Anna Karenina, it is the other protagonist in the novel, Konstantin Levin who provides the reader with an outlook that there can be joy even in struggle.  Levin, not Jewish despite the name, struggles throughout the book to find meaning in life despite the fact that his wife is kind, he is father of a new born, he is a good landlord. At the end of the novel he comes to this recognition …[M]y life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only NOT meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!…I have discovered nothing.  I have found out what I knew.”

What was it that he knew without reason?  That love for the other makes life worth living and that it is in his power as a loving person to do good in this world.  Tolstoy was not Jewish though he became a religious person.  Shai Held, the president of the Hadar Learning Institute, in his new book, Judaism is Love insists that love is preeminent among Judaism’s values.  Life itself, our individual lives, as well as the existence of this planet, is an act of grace.  We have done nothing to deserve any of it.  As Maimonides puts it, “Reality as a whole – that God brought into being – is grace.  And Held writes, “For Judaism grace is entwined with love.  God creates the world, we are taught, as an act of grace, benevolence and love…But God doesn’t just want to bestow benevolence; Judaism’s startling claim is that God wants to love and be loved.” Or in the words of Rabbi Aharon Kotler, one of the most significant rabbis in the 20th century yeshivah world, “The whole purpose of creation is love and a person is obligated to conduct themselves accordingly”.

How many times are we commanded to love in the Torah?  V’ahavta et Hashem Elokecha we state twice a day in the first paragraph of the Shema – Love God.  The great principle of the Torah is V’ahavta l’Rayecha kamocha – Love your neighbor as yourself.  And more often than either of these commands is “V’ahavtem et haGer” Love the stranger.

In Leviticus, in the section known as the Holiness code, the mitzvah of loving your neighbor comes before loving the stranger. The order in which the Torah stacks these verses teaches us that loving one close to you, your neighbor, your fellow Jew, leads to the development of a wider vision of love.

Shai Held make a distinction between caring for which is about someone, in which we work to ameliorate their pain and celebrate when such people flourish, and caring about which calls for a wider net but a greater distancing between myself and the object of concern.  ‘Caring for’ is more limited – maybe just my immediate family, maybe just a few people. Caring about takes in the entire world but you can’t care for the entire world, it’s too immense. As the philosopher Nel Nodding puts it, “I can care about the starving children in Cambodia and send five dollars to hunger relief…and feel somewhat satisfied, but I can’t know exactly where my money went…  ‘Caring about’ always involves a certain benign neglect”.  Or to put it a little more crudely, as Larry David asserts in Curb Your Enthusiasm, “I hate people, but I love humanity.”

This was what seemed so paradoxical in the campus rallies for Palestinians.  Most of the protesters had no connections to or knowledge of Palestine, its history, its culture, nevertheless they sensed that Israel’s massive attack was wrong and unfair.  That compassion and love for a distant people might have been admirable had they not spit on and physically threatened actual human beings who had nothing to do with the conflict other than being Jewish. 

Shai Held makes the compelling case that particularism, in the case of Ahavat Yisrael, loving Jews, is worthwhile for several reasons.  He cites the political theorist David Miller arguing that people who see themselves as part of the Jewish people are linked, as are many other groups, by “a set of shared understandings about what it is that they are members of, and what distinguishes them from outsiders’; this David Miller maintains, is “sufficient to bind them together into relationship that has genuine value.”  That is if Nel Noddings’ point is that caring about the world is too broad, loving one’s own people is a bridge to that larger value of caring about. 

For the ultimate goal, as expressed by the prominent kabbalist Rabbi Hayim Vital, is to be a virtuous person who loves every person, Jew and Non-Jew alike.

Ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, includes pride in our people's religious heritage, passionate about keeping our ethical and spiritual teachings alive, delight in our food, music, literature. To love Am Yisrael is to love the ideals of the Jewish people, our Torah and all those who interpret that Torah.  It is closely tied to love of the land of Israel, our place of origin and the site where our people's deepest dreams and longings will one day be fulfilled.  The prophet Isaiah proclaimed “I will … make you a light of nations, That My salvation may reach the ends of the earth.” “The cry “Violence!” Shall no more be heard in your land,” “They shall plant vineyards and enjoy their fruit.” Is.49:6, 60:18, 65:21 

And writes Shai Held, “Love of the Jewish people is, primarily, love of actual, flesh and blood Jews. It is first and foremost, love of individual Jews, not love of the Jewish people as an abstraction or a collective.”

But our Jewish ethics cannot allow our primary concern to be our only concern.  Rabbi Akiva and his student Ben Azzai argued over what truly was the great principle of Torah.  Rabbi Akiva taught it was ‘Love Your neighbor’, rayecha meaning fellow Jews.  But Ben Azzai argued it was the verse in Genesis: “This is the record of Adam’s line —When God created humankind, it was made in the likeness of God.”  By doing so he made universalist love the great principle.  This too must be part of the Jewish ethics of love.  Or as the philosopher Marilyn Friedman explains, “social institution should be structured so that partiality, as practiced in close relationships, contributes to the integrity and fulfillment of as many people as possible”.  In other words, our love for our family, should lead to love for others with a set of shared understandings of history, heritage and beliefs, and that should lead to love of all human beings for we are all created in the Divine image.  This is what motivates my involvement in We Make Indiana.  I care that all my literal neighbors in South Bend and this county have decent housing, healthy food, decent wages and quality schools where their children are safe and can be educated to the best of their abilities.  It is through my love of fellow Jews, with whom I share values and traditions, that I am able to amplify my love for people who are different and yet similar.

Ahavat Yisrael, Love for fellow Jews, has concrete ramifications for our very own Sinai community.  We at Sinai are part of the liberal and egalitarian Jewish community in South Bend.  Temple and the funders of our local Federation are also part of this progressive, modern and broad-minded coalition.  The leadership of both synagogues have been meeting over the last year to find a way for the two synagogues to collaborate, possibly on the campus of the Jewish federation.  This is crucial to the future of the liberal egalitarian Jewish population of our region, which really stretches from Southwestern Michigan to North Central Indiana.  The idea of Ahavat Yisrael has to expand our concept of what our individual communities are.  Members of our communities get along while diverse in our politics, race, gender, ethnic origin and financial status, certainly we can find compromise in dissimilar views on kashrut, prayer, Shabbat and holiday observance. 

For what ties us together is something greater:

We all are linked through our sacred texts.

We all are linked through our concern for fellow Jews.

We all are linked through our commitment to egalitarian practice – that Jewish men and women have equal access to sacred ritual.

We all are linked to our understanding that the Land of Israel is special to our people.

We all are linked through our commitment that the Jewish people are a global people, not limited to narrow racial differences.

We all in the Liberal Jewish tradition are linked through our acknowledgment that gender and sexual orientation is fluid and God is the author of that reality.

That is why everyone is welcome to join this community, though we must admit that our particularist universalism is limited:

No one who is callous and malicious to our members is welcome.

We have no litmus tests here.  You can be rah-rah Israel or anti-Zionist. But if you ignore the trauma of your fellow Jewish-Israeli members or those of us who have family and friends in Israel when Israel is suffering or if you belittle those who are concerned over Israeli aggression, you are not welcome here.

If you are uncomfortable with Gay and Trans Jews or visitors, well keep it to yourself, but if you express that discomfort and make such members uncomfortable, you are not welcome here.

I don’t care what your views of immigration policy are, but if you make the members or visitors of our community who have migrated to South Bend feel less than welcome, then You are not welcome here.

If you are the type of person who is disturbed by people who look different from you, whether skin color, or physical disability, work to overcome it, but if you make our community folk ashamed to come to shul, then you are not welcome here.

To be Jewish is a great privilege.  It is an act of grace that our people exist, and thus a gift of love for us to be part of this magnificent and magnanimous people.  As Shai Held notes, God’s love is grace – we don’t earn it but we do have to learn to accept and receive it.  Let us commit this day to accepting that love and through that bestowal of love to love others in widening circles in return – to our family, our people, our local neighbors and the world.