Ezekiel and I: Thoughts on Netzavim Vayelech and Therefore Choose Life

 Ezekiel and I: Thoughts on Netzavim Vayelech and Therefore Choose Life 

Last week, I pointed out that there was a ceremony of offering of the 2^nd tithe for the poor, in which we were told to declare that nothing had been set aside for the dead or for mourning. I pointed out that the emphasis throughout the Torah is life, not death.

This week, we have the portion of Netzavim-Vayelech. Moses is driving home his final pitch to the children of Israel:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed ( Deut 30).

The choice, it is very clear, is in our hands, and this is the very theme of our season, the month of Elul, leading into the Aseret Yemai Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance.

There yet remains, in this idea of choice and consequence, one thought: Moses is constantly speaking to the people as a group. In the Torah, very little is actually said about responsibility and consequences to the individual. Indeed, in Jewish thought, we always have the metaphor that we are all in one boat together. We float together or we sink together.

Is there a “Me” in this picture, as opposed to an “Us”?

Yet, as we have come to recognize, individual responsibility became a corner stone of Jewish thought and with it, individual thought, rather than “group think”.

 It gradually made its way into the Jewish psyche, so that in the old  Soviet Union, where Jews had been removed from contact with Judaism, the head, Nikita Khrushchev( remember the one who banged his shoe on the desk at the UN)  could complain of our fellow Jews:

"They are all individuals and intellectuals. They want to talk about everything, they want to discuss everything; they want to debate everything--and they come to totally different conclusions."

How did we get to be this way? How is it that we have been singled out as proponents of individual difference, of individual responsibility?

To answer this, we look to a prophet who taught and wrote long after Moses, who taught and wrote when all the predictions by Moses of the failure of the people and of exile had come true, the Prophet Ezekiel. It is this prophet who lays the groundwork for individual responsibility, choice and consequences. He is the father of Jewish ego psychology; that is some twenty-five hundred years before Freud’s adversary, Alfred Adler, discovered the power of conscious rational choice.

In two earlier sermons I had mentioned Isaiah and Jeremiah as molders of contemporary Jewish and universal thought-Isaiah for the messianic concept, and Jeremiah and the response to catastrophe.

Now, I will examine Ezekiel as the founder of ego psychology.

Unfortunately, he has always been plagued by bad press-he is always picked on as the most unusual, most bizarre of the prophets. If anyone writes on flying saucers in antiquity, Ezekiel's vision of the heavenly wheeled winged creatures always earns a full page or two. When our fundamentalist neighbors try to predict the end of days, when world powers obliterate each other with nuclear weapons, it is always based on Ezekiel's vision of the War of Gog and Magog. Whenever life after death is discussed, there is Ezekiel with his vision of dry bones growing skin and coming back to life. He is now perhaps best known for Ezekiel Bread, based, the manufacturer claims, on the ingredients Ezekiel used in his loaf.

To be frank, he almost failed to make it into the Bible. When the early sages where deciding what to include, they were perturbed at Ezekiel’s many prediction which had failed.

His assets, however, outweighed his liabilities, and, instead of his works being buried, they were preserved, for our benefit.

Ezekiel was a man of tremendous imagination and a marvelous flair for dramatics; hence his unusual imagery. However, behind the highly colorful depictions in his writings, there lurked real substance.

It is Ezekiel who gives great weight to the idea that the individual is responsible for his or her own actions.

Let's transpose our minds from that of twentieth century sceptics to ancient middle easterners. What thought had we of ourselves and our actions?

The Hittites, a few centuries before Ezekiel, had a poem, in rough translation, as follows:

"Men and gods are all alike. If the servant angers his master, then they kill him, his wife, his children, brothers, sisters in-law, the whole lot. If a man angers his gods, then he doesn't punish him alone. No, he destroys his wife, children, descendant’s cattle and harvest as well."

In other words-what I do is of no significance-I get punished for the other guy’s faults.

Standard law in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq and Syria, just in those lands where Ezekiel was sitting in Exile, had laws that applied this complaint and put it to practice: a murderer could offer a substitute to be executed in his place, for example-son, brother, wife, slave; it really didn't matter who was punished, as long as someone was, and justice was thereby done.

It is true that Ezekiel didn't break ground entirely on his own

Biblical law had long before held that, when it comes to crime, only the guilty could be punished-the sons could not be held accountable for the crimes of the fathers, and the individual had long since been accorded the possibility of choosing right from wrong.

Nevertheless, it was still only an embryo of an idea.

The courts could not punish the sons for the sins of  the fathers, but God could. Entire families could be held liable out by divine decrees for the sin of one member. It’s there in the Ten Commandments; it’s there in the revelation to Moses at the Golden calf.

In Ezekiel’s time, the popular slogan was: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children have their teeth

set on edge." In other words-what one does is of no account-
it has already been determined by ancestral deeds and misdeed. Why bother being a righteous, decent person-it won't do any good anyway.

When Ezekiel hears this proverb, he explodes:

"What mean you by this proverb!  As I live, says the Lord God, you shall no longer use that proverb. Behold, all souls are mine. The soul that sins-it shall die, but if a man be just he shall surely live."

Ezekiel continues his lesson to the public gathered to hear him: A just man can have a wicked son-that son will get no credits for the father's sainthood. But a wicked man can, in turn, have a righteous son. Nothing that the father did wrong can be held against the son.

With one fell swoop, Ezekiel throws out of consideration ancestral history as a determinant of human fate. He also makes impossible the entire concept of original sin, upon which Christianity has hung its peg.

Ezekiel moves even further. The worst person, he contends, is endowed with free choice--he can change his actions and become a saint. Even a saint has free choice-he can become a sinner.

In short, in the eyes of both God and man, people are individuals, free to choose right and wrong, and responsible for the rewards and consequences of their deeds and misdeeds.

It is possible to call Ezekiel's words a declaration of independence of the individual-independence from the weight and burden of ancestral wrong-doings and independence even from one's own past. You and I are at any moment radically free to choose.

The Rabbis recognized this move. The Talmud sums it up: Moses said “ He visits the guilt of the parents upon the children “( Ex.20:4) and Ezekiel came and overturned that.” The person who sins, only he shall die.” ( Ezekiel 18:4). ( Talmud Makoth 24a).

It is a heavy notion, one that took yet many centuries to take hold in Jewish thought, and one which is still not fully accepted today. In action and deed too much of humanity respond to reality with the despair that they themselves are of no consequence in the order of things.

That is behind the idea of pre-destination that is found in some streams of Christianity and very much so in classical Islam.

 Every dictatorship on the face of the earth is the consequence of such a submission to fate, such an abdication of individual responsibility and choice.

In my freshman week in college, our required reading was the novel by the behavioral psychologist, BF Skinner, Walden II. In this description of a perfect society, by this most influential of American psychologists, everyone is preprogramed for specific roles and functions. All of life's choices are intelligently chosen for the individual by the programmer.

That was the generation of Hippies, free this and free that, the generation most individualistic, yet it was just this work, which spoke of the disappearance of the individual, which was the most popular.

There are many who say we should go that route.

Freudians claim we are but an amalgam of instincts and mournful childhood experiences. The behaviorists say that we operate on the same principals as their laboratory pigeons and rats. Sociobiologists claim our behavior is determined by genetic patterns. Classical Marxists place our mode of thinking to our position in the class struggle.

But we, as Jews, have to keep room for ourselves in all of this. We look back at that ancient dreamer, Ezekiel, and constantly must remind ourselves that we are, each of us, responsible for our lives, and even as we are part and parcel of our families, our communities, and our world, we play that part well only in so far as we deal with ourselves with responsibility.

Nikita Khrushchev paid us a back handed compliment, about us being such terrible individualists; why couldn’t we be like the rest of the proletariat, sheep to follow the leader in a flock. I am sure that Pharaoh in ancient Egypt had the same complaint—after all, why weren’t we happy to be slaves like the rest of the Egyptians? Haman in Persia had the same complaint: their laws are different!

We should not let these miscreants down!

 This Rosh Hashanah, as good students of the Prophet Ezekiel, let us be sure to live up to the Prophets expectations, each of us taking responsibility. Let us fulfill the challenge of Moses, our teacher,” Therefore Choose Life.” So may it be. Amen.

The portion of Ki Tavo Now that’s what you call living!

Ki Tavo           Now that’s what you call living!          

            I want to share with you this old story, of a funeral procession.

            One of the participants at the funeral takes a look at the funeral procession--- one stretch limousine after another, on and on. Then at the cemetery, a shining gold colored coffin. Flowers by the ton on top, all the family dressed to the nines in high fashion, a marble monument that towers above everyone.

            The participant looks at all the wealth and riches spent for this funeral and decides," Dus Heist gelebt."

            Now, that's what you call living!

            At a Jewish funeral, you may have noticed one thing--one person is not allowed to go to the graveside--a Cohen, a descendant of the High Priest Aaron--may not attend, unless it is for an immediate relative. That's a strange absence. In antiquities, before there were Rabbis, there were Kohanim, Priests.  We expect that Rabbi to go to the cemetery—why didn’t our Torah allow the Priest, the equivalent of a Rabbi in his day, to go?

            We are given the special regulations regarding the Kohanim- the priests, who, in Biblical times, conducted the sacred rituals of the ancient Temple. The priests had to meet high standards of ritual purity than did the people.

            When did people come to the priest?

            At the birth of a child, the mother would come to give an offering of purification.

            When life was going wrong- the sinner would come to give a sin offering, as a step towards making amends.

            When life was going well, the grateful person would offer a korban shlamim, a peace offering.

            Who would you turn to then, in ancient times, when life came to an end? Why to the Priest, No?

            A few years ago, the burial treasures of King Tut were on display at the LA County Museum on Fairfax. There was a huge billboard on the side of the museum with the image of King Tutankhamen or Tutankhaten on it. It was great for our little granddaughter, who, had just learned about Pesah in nursery school—“That’s Pharaoh”, she exclaimed in delight.

Why do we have a good image of Pharaoh, but nothing remaining of Moses, or Aaron, or the great Kings of Israel? Blame the priest, or blame the Rabbi of his day.

In ancient Egypt, that's when the priest began to work. We have the Egyptian’s Book of the Dead; we've seen displays of their mummies, and photographs of the pyramids. That art of embalming and preserving the image of the ruler—was the job of the priest. And so it was in other ancient religions--the priest was there to guide the dead in the next life.

            What about our priest, our Cohen? Where is the priest at that moment, just when you think you need him? Where was the Rabbi of those years? In the Torah, just at that moment, when we would think the priest was indispensable, the priest disappears.  La nefesh lo yitamah beamav.  He shall not defile himself for the dead among his people. Only for his immediate family- father, mother, and so forth.

            So, just when you think you would need a priest the most, he is not there. Even till today, only if there is absolutely no one else able to do it, may a Cohen take care of the burial--only if there is no other person capable of doing it.

            Today, we expect the Rabbi to do it, but we have to remember, that in Judaism, the Rabbi is just like anyone else, not sacred, not sanctified, just another Jew who just happens to know what he, or she is doing. No more, no less.

            This practice goes hand in hand with another Biblical order:

             Throughout the ancient world, when people went to the cemetery, they would leave gifts, often food. Again, in ancient Egypt, in the pyramids, there was always plenty of food. When Pharaoh died, he had food and all his possessions placed in the tomb. In ancient China, when the emperor died, he had all his goods placed in the tomb. Even till today, in many societies there is the same practice, of placing food at the grave, for the deceased.

            What does the Torah ask of us? In Deuteronomy, we are told ,” Every third year, we take a tenth of all our produce, and we give it away--we give it to the Levite, who had no land, to the orphan and the widow, who had no provider, and to the immigrant, who had no job or protector--we had to give it away to them, no questions asked, and then declare," I have not eat of it when I was in mourning, nor have I handled it when I was impure from the dead, nor did I give any of it to the dead."

            Just what was expected in every other religion of the day, just that was forbidden in the Torah.

            Now, without a doubt, we recognize that in here is a message about life itself.

            There are a lot of cynics and skeptics in the world, for whom life is miserable, but for each one, there is an optimist and a visionary, both in Jewish and in non-Jewish sources.

            The great skeptic, Ecclesiastes, despaired of life, and said," What profit has a man of all his labor under the sun." and added," You’re better off never born alive."

            The great skeptic then turned around and also said," Even a live dog is better than a dead lion."

            The great Jewish German poet, Heinrich Heine, could complain," Life is a disease, the world is a hospital, and death is the physician."

            The same great poet also said." Life is the highest good."

            The great Yiddish writer and humorist, Sholom Aleichem, said

" Life is blister on top of a tumor, and a boil on top of that."

            That same Sholom Aleichem also created the Beloved Tevye. What is Tevye's beautiful song, in the musical version, Fiddler on the Roof?" To Life, To life, lechayim." If life were a blister, would Tevye truly be singing?

            Which of these approaches reflects the heart and soul of Judaism?

            Most religious beliefs worry about the next world--what we do there. How we stay there. What happens to us there? How we get there?

            Jews, too, have no end of speculations, but Judaism, the Torah, came to teach us about this life, this world.

            The priest kept away from the dead, to remind us that we should deal with life.

            The sacred offerings were forbidden to the dead, to remind us that we had to meet the need of the living first.

            The Torah is amazingly silent about what goes on in the next life. We are not allowed to have a séance with the dead, we cannot try to raise the souls of the dead, and we are not told what happens.

            Instead, the Psalms sing out  Lo Hametim yehalelu yah, vlo kol yardei duma.         The dead don't sing praise to God, or those that go down in silence- Va anachnu nevarech yah -But we will praise the Lord from this time on and forevermore. Hallelujah."

What is it that we sing with so much gusto at the High Holy days?

  Zochreniu lechaiym, meleckh hafets bachayim, vkatvenu besefer hachayim,lemaacha, elohim chaim.  Remember us for life, O King who delights in Life, and inscribe us in the book of life, O God of Life.” The greatest season the year and we don’t pray to get into heaven- we pray to stay here alive! The concept of a reward in heaven is a big deal for the Rabbis, but they taught us not to pray to get into Heaven, but to stay alive, not to hurry to the next world, but to create a life such that Heaven is here, in our every day actions.

            Thus, Judaism is above all a life‑affirming religion. That's why, when we raise a cup of wine, in celebration, we begin with the affirmation, " LeChayim." That is why one of the most popular symbols in Jewish artwork is the word," in Hebrew" "Chai"-Alive, and the favorite gift to a charity is the number 18, to represent the Hebrew letters used to spell Chai, alive. When we give to a charity, we affirm our belief in the goodness and value of life that God created and gave us.

            There is a very popular slogan, a good one, which I have heard. " God didn't create junk". When God creates the universe, God discovers, over and again, " Ki Tov"-- Behold it is good.

            God didn't make junk, and that includes each and every one of us.

            It is all for one purpose-- to tell us" Dus heist gelebt"--this is what you call living. This life, this day that we face, each and every day.

            The Torah, Judaism, teaches us how to live. 24 books of the Bible- 63 texts of the Talmud, the numerous books of responsa, midrash, philosphy, and law--all of the come to teach us how to live, to teach us the value and purpose of our lives.

            Therefore, we are commanded to watch over our health, and guard our lives, above all other commands, except for idolatry, adultery, and murder. We are forbidden to engage in any dangerous activity, and for the same reason, commanded to seek good health and medicine. We are taught that God presented us our Torah, our teaching, for one purpose, V Chay Bahem, you shall live because of them." We may not kill ourselves for our religion—or kill others with us to become martyrs—but we must live for our religion.

            (This is not , by the way, what Hamas and Hezbollah have as their slogans. "We are going to win, because they [ the Israelis, the Jews] love life and we love death," according to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.)

            The Torah pleads with us to choose life: God has put before us,” Life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life‑ if you and your offspring would live by loving the Lord your God, heeding His commands, and holding fast to Him  (Deuteronomy 30:19‑20).

            We choose life in leading a life filled with the spirit of kedushah, of holiness, of hesed verachamim, of lovingkindness towards each other.

            If we follows these guidelines, and truly study and learn our religious teachings, while we are alive and well, we will be able to say of our selves," Dus Heist gelebt" --That what you call living. Lechayimn to us all.

Labor Day- Reflections on Early American Jewish History

Click on link to enter Goodreads Contest:
Enter to win book giveaway contest for Courage of the Spirit

Labor Day- Reflections on Early American Jewish History

Our Torah reading today opens with the words: Shoftim ve shotrim”- You shall establish judges and executive officers, or what is in modern Hebrew, police. It is appropriate that this reading falls this year on Labor Day weekend when we celebrate the role of the working man and now woman in developing America. This day came about as the result of the struggle of workers to secure essential rights in the workplace 130 years ago.

 Establishing fairness and justice for all levels of society suffuses this portion as well as the portion before and after and this atmosphere certainly has served as a prod to challenge America to attempt to create “ a more perfect union”. By this, I don’t mean, of course, a more perfect “Labor union”, but as intended in the preamble to the Constitution, a better run and functioning society.

It might seem natural that as Jews, we would take a keen interest in the society around us. Thus, the prophet Jeremiah advised us as we began on our first exile to distant lands:

Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."( Ch 29). Getting involved in our societies would seem to be the very Jewish thing to do.

As I wrote this, however, I couldn't help but think of a  joke that was especially popular when we had the first Jewish candidate for vice-President , Joe Lieberman. The story goes that he is one day elected President, and his mother is invited to the inauguration. She turns to the woman next to her and says proudly, “You see up there. Standing next to the President? That’s my son the doctor!”

 Everybody talks about “My son the doctor” or “my son the lawyer”. Naturally, all Jews become doctors or lawyers. But do we ever talk about,” my son the governor”, or “my son the judge”?

But I guess, that when the mother of either Rahm Emanuel or Jack Lew saw their sons, they told their friends, “See,my son, the President’s Chief of Staff.”

Truth is, it has been just as natural for Jews to enter government as it is for them to be in any business or profession.

We have a long history of it, even before Moses. After all, Joseph in Egypt is second to the Pharaoh. Later on it was Mordecai to Ahashaverosh. Last week, we read love poetry by Samuel the Nagid, the Vizier of Granada. In early modern Germany, the was a Jud Suess Oppenheimer , advisor to a German prince ( tragically,executed when his political fortunes fell)

We have also made excellent Prime Ministers, ever since Moses. Disraeli in England, Leon Blum and Pierre Mendez France  in France.

Even in countries that we associate with heavy anti-antisemitism, Jews had a role—Walter Rathenau in Weimar Germany, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kaminev in the USSR. Notably, all of them were eventually murdered.

It is no surprise ,then ,if Jews play part in government in anti-Semitic lands or lands in which Jews were barely tolerated, that in US there should  also be Jews taking  active part in government in a free, open democracy, as equals.

So , if you allow me, I want to touch upon some celebrated and some unknown examples of how Jews, in the very earliest years of American society , took their place in making for a “more perfect union”.

Jews began to take active part in America’s politics already during the colonial and revolutionary period. To the most parts, we tended to side with the revolution, even though some Jews were prominent on the British side. Perhaps it was appropriate, for example, that

 when the British left Rhode Island, the local legislature convened in the Newport synagogue, rather than in one of the local churches that may have been bigger.

Attaining full rights in this land was not an easy done deal. Some of you may remember that we dedicated a Friday evening service to Jews in America. One of the readings was a letter by George Washington to the Jews of Rhode Island.

The Jewish community had good reason to ask for a letter from the great President. Just because we had a constitution that stated” no establishment of religion” did not yet mean full equality. That was a clause for the national government, not yet a clause for the individual states. For example, it was agreed that any new state, number 14 through 50, would need to abide by the Bill of Rights on religious equality , but the original states, 1-13 were grandfathered in. This had nothing to do with Jews, but everything to do with getting all the original states to go along with a new union.

So, we had to slog it, state by state. It was a struggle, not just for Jews, but for Baptists, Catholics and other Christian groups as well.

In I784, there was an attempt in Virginia to declare Christianity the state religion, but it was defeated. It took Jefferson, Madison and Mason two more years to remove religious discrimination in Virginia and Jefferson made sure that his fight for religious freedom was inscribed on his tombstone.

Gradually, Georgia, Pennsylvania came aboard. The Bill of Rights, with its great First Amendment, was not adopted till 1791. But, as I said, even that was no ironclad guarantee.

The Jews of Rhode Island gave the State legislature its first meeting place and President Washington wrote his great letter of acceptance to them, but the people of Rhode Island did not grant Jews full rights till 1842. The irony here is that Rhode Island was founded by people seeking freedom of religion from the oppressive leaders in Massachusetts.

 New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland and North Carolina held back till after the Civil war and after the 14^th Amendment, guaranteeing rights to all citizens.  

Here are some examples of the fights.

Maryland, for example, was an unusual case. The State Constitution, going back to the colonial era, required a public official to declare belief in Christianity. Any blasphemer or one who denied divinity of Jesus was liable for capital punishment. This proved to be troublesome for the colonies first Jewish doctor in the 1650’s who was tried on blasphemy but spared by  a general amnesty when Cromwell took over the reins of Britain.

The fight over religion continued until, in 1825, what was called “ The Jew Bill”, was passed by a majority of one vote. It was enough to declare "Belief in a future state of reward and punishment." The irony in all this is that Maryland was originally intended as a refuge for Catholics fleeing Anglican oppression.

Jacob Henry in North Carolina won election to the state legislature in 1809 but was denied the right to take his seat. He gave stirring defense of liberty and equality and was finally seated on technical grounds: Jews have legal right to make laws, but not to enforce them.

For all of this, keep in mind, we weren’t given our rights; we earned them.

I go back to the part that Jews took in helping administer and advice governments.

In the early revolutionary years, as I mentioned, Jews took an active part in fight.

Here are some examples

Frances Salvador from a prominent Jewish family in London, came to the colonies to save the family fortune, and built up farm lands South Carolina. He went from silk stockings to leather stockings, a real frontiersman, and soon was elected to the provisional congress

As a representative of South Carolina, he was authorized to stamp new American currency.

Keep government costs down, and took part in drafting the state constitution. He would die in battle for the newly emerging State

Then there was one Mordecai Sheftall, Chairman of the Parochial Committee of Christ Church Parish, effectively, the governor of that part of Georgia. This stunned the British colonial governor James Wright, who protested, "One Sheftall, a Jew, is on the parochial committee. This fellow issues orders to captains of vessels to depart the king's port without landing any of their cargoes legally imported!.”

He was captured as a rebel and imprisoned. Here we learn how Yiddish is useful. While the British captures tormented him with pork, he chatted with the German-nationals in the British forces in Yiddish and made friends.

He escaped and was recaptured and was finally released. Later, US Congress would repay Sheftall for money he loaned to the government. Congress owed him $139,000 and he got back about 20 cents on the dollar. Not a good loan.

I’ll add a colorful American Jew, from the early years of the new country, Mordecai Manuel Noah. We could have used him in the middle east today.

During the War of 1812, he was appointed US consul to Tunis, to obtain the release of captured Americans.. He obtained favorable treatment of Americans by proving to Moslem leaders that, by constitution, the US was not a Christian country and it therefore deserved special treatment, unlike Christian Europe. Sending a Jew to a Moslem country even then did not make sense but he did not let the fact out, but his personal political rivals enemies did let the fact get out and he was recalled.

He then became newspaper publisher and next, High Sheriff of New York. His enemies declared” What a pity that Christians are to be hung by a Jew"!

To this he retorted: What a pity that Christians should have to be hung by a Jew!”

Of course, we best recall him for his grand dream of a Jewish homeland near Niagara Falls to be called Ararat. That, however, was not his first choice. His first choice was Palestine and in his very fertile imagination, he had accepted the consul position in Tunis in order to raise a Jewish army that would free Palestine from the Turks. What a dream, long before Herzl!

.

  Now, I will add a colorful American Christian to my list of early American Jewish leaders. Just as a Jew was consulate to a Moslem state, so a Christian was appointed consul to Jerusalem, originally in hopes of converting the Jews to Christianity. Warder Cresson, a Quaker, soon discovered that the Jews, despite tremendous poverty, could not be moved by the missionary’s lures. He began to study Hebrew, then Talmud, and Kabballah and in 1848, to the surprise of the Jewish community, asked to be accepted as a convert with the name Michael C. Boaz Israel !

Upon return to the US, his family had him thrown in jail on charges of insanity. The court released him on the grounds that conversion to Judaism is not proof of insanity. He returned to settle in his adopted city of Jerusalem.

Here was another victory in the battle for rights; in previous ages and in other lands, for a Christian to convert to Judaism must have been a sign of insanity because it was tantamount to suicide, it was an act punishable by death. In this country freedom of religion also came to mean freedom to choose religion or to switch religion or even  to opt out of religion.

We as Jews in America took part and parcel in creating a society that was open to freedom of conscience and, true with fits and starts, a society of justice for all. That is a key part, in the modern world, of a society of “ shoftim ve shotrim”, of judges and magistrates. We have benefited greatly from this society; so may others, of all backgrounds, benefit  and may this spread across the globe in this era of growing religious intolerance elsewhere.

Portion Reeh What is the Genius of the Jew

Portion Reeh   What is the Genius of the Jew   

            It never was easy being a Jew. Forget the anti-Semites; we had to deal with a very powerful and demanding God on top of that!

            Do you remember the line from Fiddler On the Roof:

            He has just announced that his daughter is to be married and the local Russian official comes up to congratulate him. He then says,

               Tevye,

               Yes, Your Honour?

               I have some news I think I should tell you as a friend.

               Yes, Your Honour.

               I'm giving you this news because I like you.We have received orders that sometime soon this district is to have a little unofficial demonstration.

              What?

               A pogrom

               Here?

               No, no, no.  Just a little unofficial demonstration.

Then Tevye goes on

               Dear God,  Did you have to send me news like that today of all days?

              I know, I know we are the chosen people.

              But once in a while, can't you choose someone else?

Here is another take on this odd question by a British poet, William Ewer:

               How odd of God

               To Choose the Jews.

                

To this, there have been several retorts all attributed to a variety of authors:

 But not so odd

As those who choose

A Jewish God

Yet spurn the Jews

Or

               Not odd of God. / Goyim annoy 'im,-- attributed to Leo Rosten.

But finally, this one is most apt:

                "Not so odd / The Jews chose God”

Did we choose? As we have it in the Torah, we can see that not only were we chosen, but we were set up as well with serious demands and expectations.

     Our  Torah reading opens with these words:

            “Reeh anochi notayn lifneychem hayom brachah vklalah

            Behold., I set before you this day a blessing and a curse

            The blessing-if you observe the Commandments of the Lord your God,

            The curse--if you fail to observe the commandments.

            (Deut. 11:26)

They are echoed again,at the end of the Torah--Reeh natati lefanecha hayom et hahyim ve et hatov veet hamavet ve et ha ra(30:15)

Behold I have set before you today  life and good  and

death and evil...I call on heaven and earth to bear witness today that I have given you life and death, blessing and curse--therefore uvaharta bechayim--therefore choose life.

            It is a doctrine, one of the few dogmas that we Jews cherish, beside the belief in one God, that whatever our circumstances, whatever our fortune and fate--rich or poor, healthy or ill,--ultimately the choice of good or evil, and the consequences, are in our hands. But we have the choice.

            God may have indeed chosen us, as we say at the Torah blessing” Atah Bachar banu”- You have chosen us form among all peoples. We too, have our “ choosing”, as we have it in these verse from the Torah.

            This has been at the essence of Jewish existence-- to choose--Torah versus licentiousness, Judaism versus disappearance.

            Judaism preaches choice, and we Jews have remained Jews, over the centuries by choice, solely by our free choice. We didn’t have to remain as Jews.We are the product of generations that chose to remain as Jews.

            I want to quote for you from an essay my father wrote, and I excerpted it in my book, Courage of the Spirit. This is from his essay, "A Heroism that hasn't been recorded."( P.4)

( For information on thebook, go to www.courageofspirit.com )

******************************

"Genius has been defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains. Jews had no doubt more than any group in the world the infinite capacity for taking pain. However, I think that taking ridicule requires even more of true genius than the capacity for taking any other kind of pain.

To be a Jew was to invite a firing squad, and the worst of all was a roar of laughter and ridicule.

Everyone was free to take out his heart on the Jew; he was the only one who could not retaliate, for the offender had the police, the church, the army, and the whole society lined up before him.

All of this was not something irremediable, for every Jew could easily and at any time change his status of a pariah into that of a highly respected citizen.

The historian, Louis Golding wrote, "The acceptance of a single drop of baptismal water was enough to entitle him to remain and enjoy his property, the scenes in which he had been brought up and the land where his fathers lay buried... he could have thrown off his rags and clad himself in scarlet and enjoyed peace and affluence, by pronouncing one single word, a word which he did not pronounce". 

 The Jew was the only one who turned a deaf ear to all the calls to exchange security for his way of life. He alone remained out of the general swim, in fact, against the crowd. People scoffed and jeered and mocked and made sport of him, and he went on, unheeding, undismayed and undiscouraged.

            In all the history of mankind, no nation ever displayed such a civil bravery as the nation of Israel. It is a history with the leitmotif that a hero is one who conquers daily his temptations toward cowardly conformism. The Jew took dirt, misery, hunger, fever and ridicule in stride and seemed to have inexhaustible reserves of strength.

            The emblem of a Scottish University has on it

." They say", "What say they?  Let them say! They scoff. Let them scoff!

            This was the  motto of the Jew.  He walked majestically with his caftan, beard, and ear locks through a hostile world like a soldier marching to his goal through searing flames and minefields.

            The capacity to endure laughter and ridicule day after day and the smallness of stupid, prejudice- bound minds; the epic of sacrifices in the day by day life of the Jew, this is the unsung unique heroism of the Jew, and there were no historians to record this day by day heroism.

   How as such a heroism possible?

            He was armed with antidotes to the Gentile climate of opinion. The strongest was the consuming sense of the presence and reality of God , with a compulsive urge to magnificence. He was able to stand aside as long as he considered his own way of life the constant and that of others as the variable.

            He lived in his own world, he enjoyed the full benefits of a universally shared world vision--klal Yisrael-- a body of belief, a complex of metaphysics and myth. The fence around the Torah was his castle.

            Out of his intimacy with God, the Jew considered his destiny inseparable from him, whose shekhinah  --divine presence--went with him into exile. He knew  that with him is the shekhina begaluta-the divine in exile.

            The Jew was armed to suffer sneer, the smallness of stupid unthinking prejudice and rudeness, for he was convinced that "The stone which the builders rejected will become the chief corner-stone of a better world, and that they who sow in tears shall reap in joy. They scoff-let them scoff.

            This is the history of the Jew of yesterday."

******************************************************************************

My father then ended his essay on the question of “what of today?.

"The Jew of today? He ran out of convictions and therefore the Herculean task of battling against a whole world is not his anymore."

            Today, we seem to have it all. Our Jewish community is wealthy, as has no community before in Jewish history; we are highly educated, as has no other community been before; we hold high positions in government, are leaders in business, in academics, in the culture and arts, and entertainment.

            This is also the age that has seen the creation of the State of Israel, a testimony to the vigor of our people, to rise out of the ashes of the destroyed communities of Eastern Europe, of North Africa, of Western Asia.

            Yet, for all that is good, we are concerned. Yet we must ask the question--have we indeed run out of our convictions. Have we indeed abandoned the herculean task of going against the main-stream? What have gained, with all our well-being, if we have traded in our yiddish neshamah, our Jewish souls in the consequence. The demographics surveys and the Pew Polls all speak of the shrinkage of Jewish numbers in this nation, of a dangerously high rate of marriage out or just plain dropping out.

            As I said at the opening, Moshe Rabbenu challenged us. Behold I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.

            The challenge, then, is for us, to make the choice, which Moses taught us only we can make, each and every one of us, to choose life, to choose the path of heroism, to choose the path of Judaism. Our ancestors could do it, under fire, under siege, under the greatest adversity. May we be granted the courage and the vision, Amen.