Second Day of Festivals at the Worship and Study Minyan - Part 1

Recently, there was an exchange on our Discussion list about the Second Day of Yom Tov in the Diaspora—in Hebrew: yom tov sheni shel galuyot. The posts offered thoughtful reflections on our current practice, which has developed over time in response to Rabbi Gold’s decision, many years ago, that the minyan, like congregations in Israel and in the Reform movement, would observe a single day of festivals. (As with Israeli and many Reform congregations, we would continue to celebrate a second day of Rosh Hashanah.) This issue may seem somewhat rarified, but it raises significant practical and ideological questions.

In practical terms, when the eighth day of Pesach falls on a Shabbat, Israel and the Reform movement continue on with the Torah-reading cycle and are thus “out of sync” with the rest of the Jewish world for several weeks or, as will happen in 2016, for several months. A lesser challenge is the need to combine the rituals of Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah into a single, lengthy, and tonally-disjointed service.

Turning to ideology, I have attempted to reconstruct Rabbi Gold’s original decision on the basis of various conversations and the posts on the list serve. If other members have recollections of conversations with Rabbi Gold or, even better, access to a written record of his thoughts on these questions, I would very much like to hear from them. As far as I understand, his decision stemmed primarily from a rejection of any notion of the inferiority of “diaspora” Judaism. If Israeli Jews were no longer in galut (exile--a loaded term in Israel-diaspora relations to be sure!), neither were diaspora Jews who had built glorious Jewish civilizations across the world. Therefore, there should be consistent practice across all Jewish communities, and since the second day of the festivals had been characterized in some rabbinic responsa as an extra burden on diaspora Jews to encourage them to yearn for Zion (or, after the establishment of the State of Israel, to encourage Aliyah), that consistent practice should be to observe a single day of the festivals.

Moving from this admittedly thin reconstruction of Rabbi Gold’s reasoning to our own exploration of the issue, several questions arise:

1. If our goal, like Rabbi Gold’s apparently was, is at least in part to assert the dignity of diaspora Jewry, why wouldn’t we also want to assert the dignity of diaspora practice, which from the earliest periods of rabbinic Judaism—itself largely the product of diaspora—was to observe two days?

2. Given that the second day of the festivals places an extra burden on diaspora Jews, how does the principle of “tircha al hatzibur” (avoiding an undue burden on the community) factor into our thinking?

3. Finally, if the Israeli practice meant being “out of sync” with the diaspora Torah-reading cycle for weeks or months after Pesach in certain years, why do we (unlike our Reform brothers and sisters) immediately revert to the diaspora cycle?

Before addressing these questions directly in the context of our minyan and its practice, however, I think it makes sense to review the concept of yom tov sheni in general.

According to the Babylonian Talmud (Beitzah, 4b), yom tov sheni emerged from the potential confusion that might arise if far flung communities of Jews were not to receive word of the proper day of a festival in time for the celebration. To address this doubt (s’feika deyoma), the custom (minhag) was to observe two days of festivals. In practical terms, these included the first and final days of Pesach, the first and final days of Sukkot (the latter being Sh’mini Atzeret), Shavuot, and Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur was not doubled, given that a fast day would be too much of a burden. In the land of Israel, by contrast, Jews maintained the biblical practice of celebrating holidays for one day. The exception would prove to be Rosh Hashanah, in theory because there might reasonably be doubt about the first day of Tishrei even in the Land of Israel, although scholars suggest that the practice become widespread in Palestine only after the migration of a population of Jews from Provence in the 11th century.

One might immediately point out the slight absurdity of fixing Yom Kippur without concern for doubt five days before reasserting doubt about the beginning (and ending) of Sukkot. Indeed, for the Rabbis named in Beitzah, this custom was no longer technically necessary, since the rabbis had determined a system for calculating the calendar without reference to the physical movement of the moon. The reason for persisting in celebrating the second day was formulated as follows:

Because they sent [word] from there [Palestine]: Give heed to the customs of your ancestors which have come down to you; for it might happen that the government might issue a decree and it will cause confusion [in ritual].

This answer is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it comes from Palestine, suggesting that the rabbis there had an interest in maintaining distinct customs for communities inside and outside of the Land. Of course, we find this dictum in the Babylonian Talmud, which suggests that the authorities who compiled the gemara shared this interest in maintaining the distinction. Second, it clearly locates the practice in the realm of minhag (custom)—although functionally, the distinction between custom and law can be vanishingly small. Third, it justifies a conservative practice by reference to governmental persecution, which was much more of a given in Roman-controlled Palestine than in Babylonia.

Another justification for maintaining the practice comes a few lines earlier, when the gemara asks if R. Assi regards the two days of the festival as “one continuous holiness.” This concept of continuous holiness appears quite often in explanations about the festivals (at least from a diaspora perspective!!). If the second day of a festival is truly as holy as the first, who are we to cancel it, thus destroying moments of holiness? Indeed, for those Jews who can manage it (and in this country, many of those people work in the Jewish community!), the second day of festivals truly increases joy and celebration, even as it increases the burdens on individual Jews who feel compelled to choose between their Jewish practice and their livelihood and on congregations who often struggle to make a minyan on the second day of festivals.

Regardless, until the establishment of the State of Israel, the preponderance of Jewish life qualified as diaspora—galut. (As I’ve already noted, galut can also be translated as “exile”; which translation you choose can affect your opinion of yom tov sheni, a topic I’ll have more to say about in another post!) As such, there were very few communities who did not follow the diaspora calendar, at least officially. Even today, when both the Reform movement worldwide and essentially all Israeli congregations follow the biblical calendar, the diaspora calendar remains the default. I have tried and failed to find an Israeli luach (schedule of religious observances) online. In general, books and websites about Jewish holidays (at least those aimed beyond a Reform audience) mention the Israeli and Reform practice, but assume yom tov sheni as a default. Although there is a fair amount of dissatisfaction with yom tov sheni shel galuyot in this and other (small c) conservative congregations, the reality is that most of them will, at least officially, continue to maintain the holiness of the second day.

In future posts on this topic, I plan to have a look at the legal codes and other texts relevant to this discussion, including responsa from the Reform and Conservative movements. I will also explore, through the prism of the three questions I outlined above, the dilemmas we face in our current practice and some others we would face if our practice were to change.

However, since I am writing during the season of Sh’mini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, I want to raise it as an example as to the complexity of this issue. Simchat Torah itself (as a festival distinct from Sh’mini Atzeret rather than a repetition of it) arose only in the Middle Ages when the annual Torah-reading cycle become predominant over its rival triennial system (which ended every third Pesach and was quite distinct from our triennial system, which simply divides each of the annual system’s weekly sidras into three). Since Judaism was at that time by default a diaspora phenomenon, so too was Simchat Torah. Therefore, the process of integrating Simchat Torah into Sh’mini Atzeret was not a return to biblical or pre-exilic practice but an attempt to adapt the principle of a single day of the festival in the Land of Israel to practices that emerged in the diaspora. I mention this not to valorize one practice over another but rather to point out the complex—and ongoing—interplay between diaspora and center in the life of the Jewish people.

In this context, I’ll share a paragraph from a Chabad website:

Following the custom of the holy Arizal, many in Israel participate in hakafot sh'niyot ("second hakafot") on the night following the one-day holiday—thus joining their Diaspora brothers and sisters in their celebration of the Torah. These second hakafot have an advantage: since it is no longer a holiday, the singing can be accompanied by live music. If you are in Israel for the holiday, you might want to make your way on this night to the Western Wall, where the singing and dancing lasts well into the night.

(http://www.chabad.org/holidays/JewishNewYear/template_cdo/aid/1288162/jewish/A-Deeper-Look-at-Shemini-Atzeret-Simchat-Torah.htm)

May your fall be filled with the blessings of joy, peace, and dancing!

Rabbi Jim

Interfaith Accompanying

Rarely would I express gratitude for weather that pushes me off my bicycle and on to the T: late, crowded trains; jostling passengers; travel times increased from 25 minutes to 55 or more.  But today, I'm grateful I took the T, because I found a tweet that intrigued me:

Rev. Laura Everett ‏@RevEverett

Crowd sourcing #Lent : what are you adding/giving up for 40 days? Thinking maybe for me- no glowing screens 2 hrs before bed?

I responded:

Jim Morgan ‏@RabbiJimM

@RevEverett Love it (although of course I don't do lent)--but I think I should do that all the time!! Not giving up tv but taking sleep!

And that got us going on a twitter-only conversation (my first, by the way) in which Rev. Laura suggested that we "swap" Lent practices, even that she would take on kashrut during the 40 days (which is actually more because Sundays, it turns out, don't count).  First order of business, Laura said, was for me to obtain and consume a pancake for Fat Tuesday, i.e. today.  (Kimchi pancakes and potato pancakes--i.e. latkes--wouldn't do, but a crepe would be fine.)

Although I was very excited about the pancake, I wasn't entirely comfortable with a "swap," since it wouldn't do for me to take on a Lenten practice (awkward that, for a rabbi). So I suggested instead that we accompany one another during our periods of spiritual preparation for major holidays.  I would accompany her during Lent as she prepared for Easter through repentance and fasting.  Laura would then accompany me (beginning before Easter arrives, since the Jewish and Christian calendars do not coincide this year) during S'firat ha-Omer, the Counting of the Omer, a time of self-examination and partial mourning practices when Jews prepare for Shavuot--the holiday that celebrates our receiving of Torah.

We haven't discussed it in detail, but over twitter we started a list: we will learn each other's texts, help each other maintain our practices (she's giving up screens after 9:30 pm--I notice I'm writing at 10:30, so I'm not much help so far!), and visit the other's congregation.  I suggested that she join our minyan (Worship and Study Minyan at Harvard Hillel) for Shavuot, where we could offer a joint reflection on our experience of accompanying one another.  In my ignorance, I'm not sure when would be most appropriate for me to join her congregation--I am eager to learn.

And yes--I still made a point of eating a pancake tonight--a lemon and sugar crepe from Paris Creperie in Coolidge Corner (so delicious--I was happy for the dispensation!), and I hope Laura will nosh on hamentashen for Purim (perhaps she'll even join us at Hillel for the Megillah!).

And all of this learning and reflection because of the snow storm that kept me off my bicycle!

Dedicating Ourselves to the Rebuilding of Jewish Life in Ukraine

This week, as my family has lit the Hanukkah candles, I have placed the Soviet Jewry Movement and Boston’s participation in the Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project alongside the rededication of the Temple as miracles to be thankful for.  This inclusion is especially appropriate because last week, we celebrated the 25^th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Soviet Jewry.

On December 6, 1987, over 250,000 people, representing 300 Jewish Federations, Community Councils, synagogues, youth groups, and other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations, rallied at the Washington Mall to urge President Reagan to prioritize human rights in his upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.  The March was the culmination of the struggle to free Soviet Jewry and it succeeded. Like present-day Maccabees, Jews came together against mighty odds and contributed to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Jewry Movement was about more than rescuing Jews from the USSR. It was about the freedom of Jews to celebrate their culture and religion. Over the following months and years, more than one million Jews emigrated from the USSR to Israel, Europe, and the United States. 

At least as many remained behind in the Former Soviet Union, a place where generations of Jews were forbidden to practice Judaism and where many hid or even forgot their Jewish identity.  With the fall of Communism, however, came the opportunity for renewal, even as Jewish life remains a challenge throughout the region.

Amid the heroic efforts of many individuals and agencies, we in Boston were fortunate to partner with Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, where a thriving Jewish community has risen out of the ashes of the Holocaust and Communism to become one of the most important communities in Europe.

Through JCRC's 20-year partnership in the Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, which thrives thanks to generous funding from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, many Jews in Greater Boston have been privileged to play a small role in the miracle that has happened there: the rebuilding of Jewish life. In the process, our partners have inspired many of us to reengage our own Jewish identities.

Today in Dnepropetrovsk, 400 students attend the Jewish Day School, Dnepropetrovsk Hillel recruits the largest Birthright delegation from the FSU, and the largest Jewish communal center in Europe has just opened.

At the same time, the community continues to honor its obligation to the heroes and heroines of the past. With Boston’s support and expertise, they have opened the assisted living facility Beit Baruch and the new Jewish Medical Center to care for elderly Jews. Ida Tzypkina, one of the first residents of Beit Baruch (and known to many in Boston as “Yiddishe Mama”), now lives her life in dignity and safety, celebrating her Jewish heritage in ways she never thought possible during the war.

Challenges remain, and Jews in Dnepropetrovsk and beyond still struggle with antisemitism, poverty, alienation, and the lingering effects of the Soviet suppression of Jewish life.  But this year we recall our partners in Ukraine, along with the countless FSU Jews in other lands, who have accepted these struggles and have dedicated themselves to rekindling Jewish life. For this blessing, we thank the heroes of the Soviet Jewry Movement who helped bring this miracle to reality.  We will strive to follow their example.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!

Dnepropetrovsk Trip Report – Executive Summary

October 17-23, 2012

JCRC’s very productive visit to Dnepropetrovsk coincided with the opening of the Menorah Center, the largest Jewish communal building in the world.  With this opening, Dnepropetrovsk confirms its status as a central Jewish address in Ukraine and all of Eastern Europe.  Thanks in part to the advocacy of the Boston Jewish Community, the building is wheelchair accessible and offers an unprecedented opportunity for the inclusion of people with disabilities and their families.  Most of the Jewish community’s offices will be located in the Menorah Center, which also houses a Museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust (with the support of the JDC), a hotel, a youth hostel, a kosher supermarket and restaurants, a concert hall, and a large scale ballroom facility. 

Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki has made it clear that the relationship with Boston has helped make the Menorah Center become a reality.  To give a specific example, the community acted on advice from Boston partners to make the management of the Menorah Center independent of its other activities, which has both improved the building and freed the community to focus on its religious, education, and charitable priorities.  Unfortunately, they do not expect to receive any dividends from its operations for some years. 

Beth Moskowitz, the chair JCRC’s Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, received the honor of cutting the ribbon for the new museum, and was the only woman to be named during the ceremony—another example of subtle Boston advocacy!

Invited to cut the ribbon at the entrance to the museum were Yuri Kiperman, one of the pioneers of the Jewish renaissance in Dnepropetrovsk, Beth Moskowitz, leader of the delegation from our sister Jewish Community of Greater Boston (USA) and the chair of their Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, and Leon Sherman, a philanthropist who has donated a unique collection of artifacts to the museum (http://djc.com.ua/news/view/new/?id=8101).

Much of our visit was devoted to developing our medical partnerships with old and new partners.  The Corky Ribakoff Women’s Clinic will soon celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, and we hope to celebrate that milestone in the spring.  We were proud to learn that the training Dr. Valeria Sidelkovskaya received this past spring in Boston has paid off: her new skills with the Doppler feature of the Ultrasound Machine we donated in 2009 allowed her to make a life-saving diagnosis.  With our friend Yuri Bolbot, we made plans for a post-graduate course in pediatrics in the spring, including an effort, in cooperation with the Medical Academy and the Dnepropetrovsk Municipality, to spur a media campaign encouraging the immunization of infants and children.  Finally, one of our Boston doctors, a psychiatrist, lectured about postpartum depression at Hospital No. 3 to twenty doctors and nurses from throughout the city.

We also had meetings with several of our agency and Dnepropetrovsk partners, including one with Marsha Frankel of JF&CS, who works (among many other projects) with the Educational Resource Center for Special Needs, and Susan Wolf-Fordham, co-chair of the ERC Steering Committee, where we came together to sketch out a strategic direction as Beit Chana Teaching College (the host of the ERC) begins plans to move downtown next to the Menorah Center.  Our collective vision is to make the ERC a lab school for a new Department of Special Needs Education at Beit Chana.  Both Beit Chana and the community at large are committed to the inclusion of children with special needs throughout the community.  For instance, our Jewish Big Brother and Big Sister program for the first time includes “littles” with Downs Syndrome who have been welcomed with open arms by the other children.

Thanks to the generosity of an individual donor, the ERC has been able to add an accessibility ramp to the new van they received from Women’s Philanthropy during the Community Mission last May.

 Beth Moskowitz watches as Tamara Olschanitskaya and Svetlana Efimova ride the new accessibility ramp. 

   Larissa, Sonia, and Sonia, littles from Jewish Big Brother Big Sister of Dnepropetrovsk at the Day School.

Finally, Beth and Noga Nevel had a productive conversation with the leaders of Dnepropetrovsk’s Next Generation Movement, making plans for a trip to Boston in the spring of 2013 and ongoing social media communication.

The trip culminated in a beautiful Shabbat, with dinner at Rabbi Kaminezki’s and lunch with Zelig Brez and his family.  As usual, we came away with an infusion of yiddishe ruach in our souls and a sense of the blessings of this remarkable partnership.

Engaging Difficult Jewish Stories - Sermon for Yom Kippur 5773

Rabbi Jim Morgan
Sermon for Kol Nidre, 5773
September 25, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel

Shana Tova, and G’mar Hatimah Tovah.  I’m Rabbi Jim Morgan, and I am so glad to be with the Worship and Study minyan for my first yamim nora-im. 

These are the Days of Awe, days of terror, days when we look into ourselves and see all that is wanting.  Days on which review our actions, our decisions, and cannot help but ponder the things we did wrong, the things we would change if only we could.  And they are days for difficult conversations, both with our selves and with our loved ones and friends.  For our community, they are days for difficult stories, difficult and challenging texts in the synagogue.

Torah texts can always present challenges to our worldview, challenges to our assumptions.  Often we disagree intensely with the point of view Torah presents.  At other times, passages we disagree with intellectually somehow resonate with us emotionally, so we feel a crisis of ambivalence.  There are, of course, stories that we simply find disturbing, and we would prefer not to think about it, thank you very much.  Then there are those passages that we really just wish were not in scripture—they are so disturbing, so horrifying, that really wouldn’t be better simply to excise them?

The texts we read on the yamim noraim are just such texts—consider: at his wife’s behest, a father banishes his concubine and their son to the desert and to their likely death; the same father obeys God’s command to sacrifice his son, who is saved only at the last minute by that same God withdrawing the command; God then instructs the Jews in a confusing and disturbing ritual that will effect atonement for the community’s sins. 

On Yom Kippur afternoon, we are faced with a particular textual challenge: Leviticus 18 rehearses a list of forbidden sexual unions, culminating in a tripartite condemnation—and you’ll forgive me for quoting the King James Version, which was the basis for the "old" JPS translation:

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shall thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.  Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination. Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.  (KJV)

It’s hard to overestimate the hurt that these words have caused to humankind, both in their casual linkage of same-sex physical intimacy with child sacrifice and with bestiality and in the way that our tradition and its sibling traditions of Christianity and Islam have used them to oppress gay men and women.  Why, voices in our community, in our congregation will ask, should we read these horrible things? Is there not anything more edifying to read on the most solemn day of the year?  Well, indeed there is, and you can find it in our machzor, and indeed we will read it tomorrow.  Instead of Leviticus 18, we’ll skip to the next parasha and read chapter 19, from Kedoshim—you will be holy.

This substitution is not a tradition that started in the Conservative movement.  Rather, by the early twentieth century the Reform Movement was reading selections from Leviticus 19 in the Union Prayer Book.  The practice extended to the Reconstructionist Movement, whose first machzor in the late forties designated Leviticus 19:1-18 with no option to read Chapter 18.  In the current Reconstructionist machzor, Kol Haneshama, the commentary explains that “The forbidden sexual relationships [in Leviticus 18] strike many contemporary Jews as inappropriate to the mood of the day, and they are objectionable in a number of their particulars, perhaps most notably in their condemnation of homosexual relationships.”[1]

To my ear, this commentary sounds anachronistic—certainly liberal Jews today are concerned with gay rights.  But in the post-war era, when the Reconstructionist Movement was editing its first machzor, there was no such concern.  Indeed I would imagine that by and large, all Jews, from Reform to Orthodox, were not focused on the ban on same-sex intimacy since it was entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial.

By the seventies, however, when Conservative movement published its new machzor—the one you have before you—gender and gay rights had begun to percolate into the general culture, and today it seems that otherwise traditionally-minded liberal Jews name this infamous verse as a primary reason to make the shift.

I understand this decision and I respect the rationale for it.  However, I disagree with it, both because it impoverishes our own conversations about the difficult aspects of our tradition and because it hampers our capacity to engage in the larger conversation about important issues, in this case, the religious case for or against the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of our society, our communities, our congregations.

Let me take the second concern first, which is less pressing for me tonight.  A quick example: among the Republican presidential candidates was one who had a tendency to claim that if we legalize marriage between two men, then we would be on the road to legalizing marriage between a man and a dog.  When such talk was common in the media, I wondered how many people understood that this seemingly bizarre and clearly non-logical connection stemmed from our sequence of verses?  My guess is that most secular-minded people had no idea, but that people who read their bibles got the reference immediately.  I imagine it was not a serious concern, but rather a coded way to refer to the bible, to score points with this candidate’s bible-reading base while insulting his opponents in an infuriating and bewildering manner.

This evening I am more concerned about how our tendency to avoid difficult texts hampers our own, Jewish conversation, our own growth, both individually and as a community.  By avoiding this text in synagogues on the days with the highest attendance, we forgo an opportunity to struggle with some of the most disturbing aspects of our tradition, to wrestle, to question, to protest, but above all to engage.

Last week, in responding to a beautiful d’var Torah by Zvi Abusch, our friend Hilary Putnam mentioned that some liberal Jews of his acquaintance argue that, like Leviticus 18, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the Akedah, is too terrifying, too disturbing, and too violent for us to read on Rosh Hashana.  Indeed, in the Reform machzor, Gates of Repentance, congregations have a choice between the Akedah and the Creation story in Genesis.  The story of Hagar and Ismael, another disturbing text, is not included as an option.

Hilary would not agree with a decision not to read the Akedah, if I understood correctly—and Hilary I apologize in advance if I’m misrepresenting you—because God’s test of Abraham echoes the kinds of tests that we humans face every day.  Abraham’s example is not necessarily one to emulate, but his situation resonates with ours in cases when we face competing loyalties and unbearable choices.  Indeed, Abraham’s behavior echoes our relationships with our own children, not in the explicit threat of sacrifice, God forbid, but in the way we favor the demands of our own heart—our own God, so to speak—over their needs.

But what, some may ask, if we see the Akedah not descriptive so much as predictive or even prescriptive?  Does the fact that this congregation not only read the Akedah but engaged in three discussions about it over the two days of Rosh Hashana mean that we will unconsciously reenact it?  Or, rather, does our act of reading and discussing give us the tools to recognize Abraham’s dilemma as our own and to negotiate it without needing to rely on God’s last minute saving grace?

I found the inspiration for these questions in another passage by Margaret Atwood, whom I quoted last week as well. She asks:

Do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right behavior”...?  Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to reenact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure?[2]

By and large, I tend to side with those who would claim that a person’s reception of the story she reads determines its effect much more than the story itself.  Of course, the kind of Jewish engagement with our stories that will “help us shape our lives for the better” requires work, requires questioning, requires attention.

I want to affirm both our need to read these stories and to challenge them the way that Abraham challenges God in the midrash: God says “Take your son,” and Abraham says “which One”, God says “Your only one,” and Abraham says “I have two,” God says “The one you love,” and Abraham says I love both of them, so God has to specify “Isaac.”

Challenging the stories is equivalent to challenging God (and a lot more comfortable for people who aren’t sure about their belief in God!). -      As Alicia Suskin Ostriker writes: “The … God of what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call, simply, the Bible or Torah, seems to like being challenged and called to account, and even rewards those who most boldly interrogate him [sic].”[3]

So that’s what I’d like us to do—to challenge and to interrogate these stories, these laws.  I don’t want us to stand idly by, letting other people determine the shape and the direction of the conversation.  Not reading it allows us not to think about it, to pretend that although gay men and lesbians continue to suffer oppression and exclusion, even here in Massachusetts, we are allowed to overlook the fact that we, our tradition, our heritage, played a role in enabling that oppression.  We must acknowledge and we must challenge.

So: Levticus 18 verse 22:  Thou shalt not lie with man, as with a woman: it is an abomination.

Baruch Levine, in his JPS commentary to Leviticus, links male on male sex with ancient Canaanites: the story of Sodom in Genesis and the concubine of Gibeah in Judges 19—truly terrible stories.  In both cases, male on male sex is a violent expression of xenophobia—as Levine comments: “This extreme fear of strangers induces a community to attack visitors.”[4]  Or, he should say, to sexually assault visitors.  Given the Torah’s emphasis on protecting the stranger, this extreme form of xenophobia aroused opposition to what came to be known as sodomy.

Rabbi Steven Greenberg also foregrounds the connection with Sodom, arguing that Leviticus 18 “prohibits the violent and demeaning ways people can engage in sexual relations.”[5]  In that sense, can we disagree with it?  In that sense, does the connection to bestiality and to Molech seem less unmotivated? He writes about Molech that “the practice of child sacrifice is the height of violence in the name of religion.”[6]  Indeed for me, the injunction against Molech resonates with the Akedah; it’s the Torah’s own internal challenge to Abraham’s—to God’s—impulse to child murder for the sake of obedience.  Just so, verse 22 is the Torah’s own challenge against the people of Sodom.  It is not a call for violence against homosexuals, even though too many people have invoked it as such.

There are many different ways to parse the halakhic implications of our verses, but none of them revokes the commandment incumbent upon us Jews—and upon Jewish communities—to protect kavod ha-briot: human dignity.[7]  In this particular case, we must to support gays and lesbians and to welcome them, truly welcome them, into our communities.  By omitting Leviticus 18, we forgo the chance to grapple with these difficult issues and thus to internalize the verse from Leviticus 19 that we will read at minchah tomorrow: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor…”

Shana tova and G’mar hatimah tova!

---

[1] Kol Haneshama: Prayerbook for the Days of Awe (Elkins Park, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1999), 1044.

[2] Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, New York Review of Books (March 22, 2012), p. 40.

[3] Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1997), xi.

[4] Baruch Levine, The JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 123.

[5] Steven Greenberg, “Never Stand Idly By,” [in] Text Messages: A Torah Commentary for Teens, ed. Jeffrey K. Salkin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012), 139.  Greenberg also argues against replacing Leviticus 18 on Yom Kippur: “Out of deference to gay people, some congregations have stopped reading that verse on Yom Kippur, but I think that just gives it more power. {Things you deny get bigger, not smaller.)”

[6] Greenberg, 140.

[7] See, for example, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel S. Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner, “Homosexuality, Human Dignity & Halakhah: A Combined Responsum For The Committee On Jewish Law And Standards” (2006): http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/20052010/dorff_nevins_reisner_dignity.pdf

Our Stories--Jewish and Otherwise -- Sermon for Rosh Hashanah, 5773

Rabbi Jim Morgan
Sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah, 5773
September 16, 2012
Worship and Study Minyan of Harvard Hillel

Shana Tova uMetukah. I am Rabbi Jim Morgan and I want to begin tonight on a note of gratitude. This is my first year as the rabbi of Worship and Study and I am honored and humbled that I stand before you tonight in the presence of my two predecessors: my teacher, Rabbi Norman Janis, and his teacher, Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, who w as also the founder of this minyan and a transformative figure in the Jewish life of this university and in the Jewish lives of so many of the people in this room. I have big shoes to fill, but also
broad shoulders to stand on, and I hope I can convey how grateful I am that both of you are here to guide me.

I want to tell you a story, beloved of my younger son Moses.

A teenager, orphaned as a small child, idolizes his father, a scientist and an inventor. He looks up his father’s former partner, who now works as the lead researcher for a giant biotech company. Intrigued by the work going on in the labs, our hero does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps into his hoodie and bites him on the neck. Soon, the boy—let’s call him Peter Parker—finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, cool wristbands that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk,
and a sudden need to seek revenge against bullies at school and criminals everywhere….

“But wait,” says Moses. “Shouldn’t the story go like this?”

A teenager, orphaned as a small child, has a best friend whose father runs a giant biotech company. One day, the two boys visit the lab and our hero—let’s call him Peter Parker—does a little too much poking around. A genetically modified spider jumps on his arm and bites him. Soon, Peter finds that he has gained strangely spider-like abilities, including super strength and odd little holes at the base of his wrists that spit out limitless supplies of arachnid silk….

Why, Moses wanted to know, are the stories different? Why does the spider jump down the hoodie of Peter Parker #1 but on the arm of Peter Parker #2? Why does Peter Parker #1 need to invent silk shooters but Peter Parker #2 just produces the silk as another form of bodily fluid? (I should acknowledge that Moses didn’t ask that second question—I did!) Behind these questions, I think, is a deeper one: which one is the true story? How do we know what really happened?

I tried to answer Moses’s question, suggesting that comic book movies, like the Greek myths he also loves, can vary details without losing the essence of the story. Different versions of stories can have different details, but I’m not sure I convinced him. Isn’t there one true story and all the others have
got it wrong?

Let me tell you another story. Let me return to a story we tell every year.

A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn, he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, and a flint stone. They are going on a journey. They travel together for a few days in the company of some servant boys. When the father—let’s call him Avraham—sees the top of the hill he has in mind, he tells the boys to stay with the ass and that his son—let’s call him Yitzhak—and he will go, make a sacrifice at the top of the hill, and return. On the way up, Yitzhak asks his father about the ram for the sacrifice—Avraham hedges. At the top, Yitzhak builds an altar of wood and Avraham binds him upon it. He raises the axe, but at that very moment, and angel calls out to him: “Avraham, Avraham!” “Here I am,” he replies and as he looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes.

But wait, someone might say, you’ve got the story wrong. Let’s return again.

A father is told by an angel to sacrifice his son. In turn he tells his son to saddle the ass and to gather wood, an axe, a flint stone. They travel for several days until they reach the base of a mountain. Leaving their servants behind, the father—let’s call him Abraham—tells his son—let’s call him Isaac—to follow him up the hill to make a sacrifice to God. “Where is the ram for the sacrifice,” asks Isaac. “God will provide,” responds Abraham.

At the top, Isaac builds an altar of the wood and Abraham binds him upon it. He raises his axe and brings it down, plunging it into Isaac’s heart. “Abraham, Abraham,” calls an angel. “Here I am,” he replies, and as he
looks up, he sees a ram, tangled in the bushes. Why, you might ask, did we change the story? Why did Abraham kill Isaac in the second story if Avraham didn’t kill Yitzhak in the first one? Why did the angel come too late in the second story? Why didn’t God intervene sooner? And in any case, which one is the true story? After all, the fate of Isaac is not just a random detail like the location of Peter Parker’s spider
bite—it determines our entire experience of the story.

Hints to some of these questions lie in our tradition itself. In Genesis, Abraham is prevented from killing Isaac, but nonetheless, Isaac disappears. Abraham returns alone to the servant boys, returns alone to Sarah, and mourns Sarah’s death alone. Isaac reappears on the scene only when Rebecca arrives on the scene. The rabbis have lots of suggestions: Abraham sent him away to avoid the evil eye, Abraham sent him to study
Torah, God took him up to the Garden of Eden for three years to recover from his trauma. That last one seems only a step away from a version that perhaps belongs more comfortably in spring at Easter time rather than in the fall at Rosh Hashana: Abraham did kill Isaac, who arose to heaven and three years later arose again from the dead to continue Abraham’s line.

I should stress that these are all Jewish, rabbinic versions of the Akedah. I take them from the prologue of a wonderful study of the Akedah by Shalom Spiegel called The Last Trial, which illuminates how successive generations shape their understanding of the story of the Akedah to make sense of their past and present, of their own lives in relation to their tradition and to the surrounding culture.(Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. and intro. by Judah Goldin [Woodstock, VT, 1993]). In particular, he’s concerned with the use of the Akedah—specifically in the version in which Isaac is killed—by Jews who experienced the Crusades and mass martyrdom. In such a reality, the horror of a father killing his son (in this case to avoid forced conversion) was perhaps less unthinkable than it would otherwise be.

For these generations of Jews, the Akedah functioned as myth—not “a myth,” as in a widespread but false belief or as in a story from this or that traditional mythology, but as myth. Rabbi Neil Gilman defines myth as “a structure through which a community organizes and makes sense of its experience.”(Neil Gilman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew [Philadelphia: JPS, 1990], 26). Gilman gives the example of psychoanalysis, in which the Freudian myth of id, ego, and superego makes sense of the often confusing vagaries of human behavior. For religious communities, says Gillman, these myths are contained in scripture and generate liturgies, rituals, and interpretations that shape the community’s experience, both in the sense of transmitting tradition and in the sense of making sense of the often confusing and sometimes traumatic events of life.

In our postmodern, postcritical condition, it has become difficult to inhabit religious myths in an uncritical way. The pressure of what we might loosely call “science” or “criticism” has pushed us away from our
stories towards ones that seem to make more rational or ethical sense: the scientific method, evolution, psychoanalysis, Marxism, Zionism, feminism, environmentalism, Star Trek—the list can go on, but all of them, I think, offer some variation of a mythic structuring of the world that their adherents can grasp hold of, can use to make sense of the world. And I should also be clear that despite many claims to the contrary, these mythic structures are not necessarily mutually exclusive: the animosity of certain psychoanalysts towards religion (and certain rabbis against Freud) strikes me as willful blindness to one’s own mythic assumptions more than as a triumphant unmasking of the other’s bad faith, but I digress…

The challenge I see here in my juxtaposition of stories is that the first set of questions about Spider Man seem to come up more readily than that second set of questions about Avraham and Yitzhak. The first, in case you
haven’t realized, are based on the distinctions between two recent movie versions of the story. The second set of questions stems from midrashim cited in a fairly obscure book, not likely to inspire a film version. But this second set of questions are full of resonance on this day of on which we proclaim the sovereignty of God (whatever that means) and celebrate the creation of the world (and let’s be honest—we don’t really know what that means either!). Which questions are we more likely to hear from our children? Which ones did I hear from my children?

Let me be clear that I don’t mean to denigrate the first set of questions. Nor do I mean to suggest that we discourage our children from watching super-hero movies—on the contrary, such stories, like other children’s stories, both literature and movies, provide heroes to identify with and emotional
struggles to recognize in oneself. Harry Potter is a hero not only because of his magical ability, but also because of his self-sacrifice and his capacity for both friendship and self-doubt. Peter Parker’s frightening new power brings forces of chaos and death into his life, forces he struggles mightily to bring under control. These stories provide mythic resonance for our children’s lives, for our own lives.

The challenge is how not to lose track of our own stories, our Jewish stories. In her recent book, In Other Worlds, Margaret Atwood “argues persuasively that myths have become detached from traditional religion,
and thus from traditional religious imagery" (Joyce Carol Oates, “Where No One Has Ever Gone,” review of Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012, p. 39-40.) Atwood writes, “I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as—for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used…. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.”

All very good, but why should we, as Jews who care about our tradition and the questions that it has engendered over the generations, be satisfied with this detachment? Can’t we love both Hermione Grainger and Rebecca? Can’t we thrill to Spider Man and to the heroic Rabbis of the Talmud? Of course we can, but here we get caught up on the question of truth. I remember several anxious parents at a Hebrew School orientation, concerned that we would teach their children bible stories, concerned, I imagine, that we would suggest to the children that these stories are true, concerned that we would attempt to turn their children into uncritical believers.

Questions of truth become irrelevant when we’re talking about Spider-Man or Star Wars—no one insists upon the literal truth of Harry Potter, so it can go about the business of mythmaking without interference from skeptics or true believers. The bible has not been so lucky, despite a legacy of midrashim that encourages the free play of the exegetical imagination upon the scriptural text. Our stories, our Jewish stories, get caught between the Scylla of fundamentalist cant that insists upon their literal truth and the Charybdis of rationalist denunciations of the bible as retrograde and false. If the bible is “literally true” (or literally false, for that matter), if there’s only one answer, if Peter Parker can be bitten on the arm or under the hoodie but not both, then these questions become inadmissible, silly even, because there’s one answer and its not worth discussing.

But stories don’t work that way—they are retold, in different times and different places with different goals. These days, if Peter Parker is a cool kid, he must be wearing a hoodie. If he’s wearing a hoodie, how can the spider get to his arm? It can’t, so it goes down his neck. If a Christian tells the story of Isaac, shouldn’t he prefigure Christ, die and be resurrected? If a Muslim tells the story, shouldn’t the son be called Ishmael and represent the true descendent of Abraham? And this shouldn’t frighten us—it’s a mark of the power of our stories that we, no less than our Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, can retell them in different configurations—even with different endings—in order to make meaning from them and from our lives. It is a mark of the power of our tradition that we return to the same stories year after year and make them new. But this we must do, and ideally more than only once a year at the high holidays. We must make a commitment to engage with our own stories, with our own myths, as regularly and as readily as we do with so many others that inform our culture. Only thus can we grow Jewishly and, what is equally important, do our part to help grow Judaism.

I wish you a year of sweetness, a year of success and life and peace—and a year of meaningful and challenging Jewish stories.

Grand Opening of the Menorah Center in Dnepropetrovsk - October 16, 2012

Greetings from Dnepropetrovsk! I am here, along with a small delegation from Boston’s JCRC and CJP, to celebrate the opening of the community’s new Menorah Center, the largest Jewish communal building in the world, which contains a museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, a hotel, a hostel, a shopping mall (with a kosher supermarket), and office space for community organizations.

The opening was a formal, caviar-fueled event, with dignitaries from the Ukrainian and Israeli national governments, the ambassadors of the United States and Germany to Ukraine, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, and the mayor of Dnepropetrovsk all present and accounted for. Hundreds of people from Dnepropetrovsk and from around the world stood for an hour or more outside the impressive building as various people made speeches and children from the Jewish Day School sang and waved flowers. After Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amara affixed the mezuzah, the ribbon was cut and the whole crowd poured into the building, admiring the recreated facades of the city’s vanished synagogues and historical films from Jewish Dnepropetrovsk. The halls rang with the voices of excited people and, when it came time to dedicate the new Museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, the strains of “Ani Ma’amim”—“I believe.” Our own Beth Moskowitz, chair of JCRC’s Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, helped cut the ribbon to the museum (as the only woman to be honored at the opening—a great source of pride for Boston).

Afterwards, we enjoyed what our beautiful invitations called “a lavish banquet,” listening to the Day School’s klezmer band and wonderful speeches. Most moving were the remarks of John Tefft, US Ambassador to Ukraine, who praised both the Jewish community for its strength and the Ukrainian government for its support of religious diversity, the bedrock of the United States’ vibrant democracy. In conclusion, the ambassador, a Catholic who hails from Kansas, recited the Shehechiyanu, in Hebrew, to an audience that included a strong contingent of black-hatted Chabad rabbis (and this one unorthodox rabbi from Boston!). Only in Ukraine. Only, in fact, in Dnepropetrovsk.

Dnepropetrovsk, which was a closed city until the fall of the Soviet Union, boasts one of the strongest and most unified Jewish communities in Europe. Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki, the Chabad shaliach (emissary) handpicked by the last Lubavitcher Rebbe more than twenty years ago, has built a thriving religious community and an impressive charitable enterprise while developing strong ties with the national and local governments. The synagogue here is crowded every Shabbat and the community’s educational programs attract a steady stream of newly engaged Jews. The city is located in the historical pale of settlement (where Jews were allowed to live in the time of the Tsars), so even as Jews emigrate, others reclaim their Jewish identity. For the Jewish community, as for the municipal and national government (and the Ukrainian majority, at least in Dnepropetrovsk), the Menorah Center underscores the admirable status of the Jewish community and its importance to the financial and cultural wellbeing of Ukraine. This in a city and a country in which both the communists and the Nazis believed they had succeeded in destroying Jewish life forever.

The Menorah Center is the brainchild of Gennadi Bogolyubov, an industrialist who is the president of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community Fund. In his speech at the opening, Bogolyubov said that he wanted to make a gift to all Ukrainian Jews, preferably in Kiev, the capital. In Kiev, however, community leaders could not agree upon a vision. In Dnepropetrovsk, where Bogolyubov was born, there was immediate enthusiasm. Dnepropetrovsk, he realized, is the Jewish capital of Ukraine and this building, its seven branches evoking the seven flames of the menorah, proves it. One can only admire the chutzpah, the self-assurance, the confidence of a community that knows its strength and is not afraid to demonstrate it with a building that evokes the past and endows them for the future.

(You can see pictures of the opening—but text only in Russian—at http://www.djc.com.ua/news/view/new/?id=8094; you can also look at my twitter feed at https://twitter.com/RabbiJimM, where you’ll find pictures, notes in English, and a record of my ongoing visit here; for information on JCRC’s Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, have a look at http://www.jcrcboston.org/focus/strength/dkp/.)