Three weeks ago I had a pretty good outline of this sermon, by last week it was on its way to completion. I was going to spend this time with you reflecting on how it came about that we chose the theme of Kehilla multiculturalism for these High Holydays. And I will spend a good part of this time talking about that issue, but the events of the last six days (has it only been that long?) require that I speak a bit concerning what is happening at this time in the world and about some of the spiritual issues that these events have raised for me.
As events have emerged, I have drafted and redrafted. On Wednesday, I thought I should talk about our sadness and sense of vulnerability; on Thursday, I wanted to talk about the spiritual necessity to overcome feelings of being a victim. But now, I find myself needing to address these issues and to add to them the issue of spiritually resisting the call to make war.
R. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that true prayer must be subversive. It is in that spirit that Kehilla was founded by R. Burt. It is in that spirit that I speak here now.
We, along with most of the world, were horrified at the events of last Tuesday. The purposeful killing of thousands of innocent civilians who were engaged in their daily work is terrible to contemplate. The horror of meaningless and painful deaths has sparked our grief, our anger, our sense of vulnerability and insecurity. It is right that we should mourn.
When we feel vulnerable and insecure, the natural reaction is to try to do something to make ourselves, or our society, secure and invulnerable. It is natural for us to feel that way, and it is reasonable for us to take appropriate steps to improve our security. But we cannot make ourselves invulnerable. We will not succeed in killing off every frustrated group that has experienced itself as the victims of United States policies.
When people primarily identify themselves with their status as a victim, when people primarily consider themselves as under attack and on the defensive and when they feel that they have been treated without the honor due them, then they will often appropriate for themselves the license to kill, and to kill not only their enemy, but to kill even innocent civilians if the group considers that this will further their cause. I say beware of victims. Hitler's sense of Germany being a victim led to the worst destructions in human history. Stalin too acted not out of sense of his country's strength, but of its weakness. Israel's tactics of control have become brutal, and excessive violence is repeatedly used, and this is easier to do because we Jews are indisputably history's victims. And the terrorists who killed thousands last week felt fully justified because they were striking out at the power that made them victims.
At this time I am very worried for the soul of the people of the United States. A solid week of our government and media repeatedly identifying ourselves as victims is giving our government the kind of license that can wreak great destruction. They are manipulating our fears and our insecurities to support efforts that will not deal with root causes but which will strike out aggressively against perceived enemies foreign and domestic, and in the end they will likely call the killing of innocent civilians "collateral damage" and they will justify this because, after all, we are the victims here.
But what does this have to do with Rosh Hashanah?
The High Holydays are set aside in the Jewish tradition for us to reconnect ourselves with whom we really are. Whether we be Jewish or not, these holydays demand of us that we reconnect with our core values and that we ask ourselves whether we are living our lives true to those values, or whether we have been sidetracked. The Torah and the prophets have a peculiar metaphor they apply to describing this process of when we have lost direction, of when we serve values that do not affirm life but affirm selfishness. They call this being seduced into idol-worship. Now the interesting thing is that these monotheistic prophets do not try to dissuade us from idol-worship by alleging that the idols do not have power. In fact, the idols have great power and they are very seductive. If they were not so attractive, there would be no point in trying to steer ourselves away from them.
Well, the attraction to invulnerability, the call to jingoistic pride in country and flag is a very seductive idol-worship, especially when we entertain the idea that we are the victims of enemies who are to be vanquished and that we will experience some sort of deliverance through their defeat.
And when we indulge our sense of victimization, we develop a special relationship with those whom we identify as our victimizers. We can project onto them all evil and this is a form of idol-worship as well. By projecting the evil onto them, we relieve ourselves of the responsibility to find the sources of evil within. We relieve ourselves of the responsibility of doing an accounting of our souls, a cheshbon ha-nefesh.
The chain of victimhood has the potential to go on forever. As I relieve my victimhood through repression of the other, I create a new victim. And so on and so on. The decision to stop that victims' chain must start with ourselves. And it's not easy trying to break that chain when we are hurting from having been attacked.
The steps toward supporting repression are taken a little bit at a time, and they don't necessarily feel repressive as you take them. It's so easy to go off course. We need to watch ourselves carefully and listen to the still small voice in all the ways we can hear it in order to redirect our steps away from the seductive voices that surround us. I want to tell you one such story from this last weekend, most of you may have heard of it already
In the wake of the New York - Washington tragedy, a resolution designed to punish the terrorists was introduced in Congress. Its implications were vast, but it is very simply phrased:
"the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons".
On Friday morning, there was a service in the National Cathedral. The prayers were bland, and the sermon by Billy Graham exhorted people to turn to God and support the government. Only one note of caution against the prevailing mood was spoken during the service. The dean of the National Cathedral, Nathan Baxter, prayed that by "the grace of God, that as we act we not become the evil we deplore."
In that moment, while listening to the still small voice in Rev. Baxter's words, one member of congress decided to vote her conscience against the bill. She was Barbara Lee. The vote was taken later that night. Of the 519 senators and representatives voting, Barbara Lee's vote was the only dissent.
Before I begin I want to note that the obvious issue facing Kehilla this year has been our growing pains. We have surged in membership to the extent that everyday we face difficult questions of how we are to maintain ourselves as an intimate community, while not closing our doors to people who seek a place in Kehilla. It's gratifying that we are so attractive as a community, but growing pains are indeed painful. What we will do about this situation will be determined by a strategic planning process that we have already started and which will continue in the coming months. But we decided not to make our growth a focus for High Holydays.
The inspiration for our theme "Nurturing Our Multicultural Synagogue," comes from the daily reality of trying to provide spiritual leadership to such a diverse community. Kehilla has always been open to interfaith families, so I was initially and repeatedly surprised when non-Jewish members of Kehilla families would express their sense of discomfort or their sense of impending discomfort as they approached some family celebration, usually a Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremony or a wedding. I'd think to myself: "Why are they worried? Haven't we always been inclusive?" And then I thought about how Kehilla had been open to lesbians, gays, bi's and the transgendered for years, but LGBT people still felt uneasy about their acceptance in Kehilla until we finally made it part of our focus for High Holydays several years ago.
And I thought about the way in which issues dealing with families with mixed backgrounds were always subsumed into a category of "interfaith families or relationships." Something about this bothered me and I wasn't sure I could put my finger on it. Then I had a talk with my old professor, David Biale, in preparation for a visiting-scholars panel inspired by the book that he had co-edited, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. David and I were talking about what the American Jewish community would be like in 50 years, and David said, "It will be the most multicultural Jewish community since the days of the first Temple."
Well this got me quite excited. First off, it stimulated me into re-languaging the issue as one of multiculturalism, and second, it made me consider that there was a precedent for this phenomenon in Jewish history. So I ran off to read David's book and discovered that it mostly dealt with the reality of Jewish people and the Jewish community living in a larger society that was multicultural. What it did not deal with was the way the community itself and the families and individuals within the community embodied this multicultural reality within ourselves. The issue for me was not that we are a Jewish community in a larger non-Jewish world out there, but rather that we are a synagogue that includes within itself and within its families and within its individuals the diversity of this society. We haven't taken any survey, but it appears that more than half of our Kehilla households include family members who were not born Jewish. And in my experience, the single factor that some family member is not born Jewish, does not make any meaningful distinction between that family and other families. For example, I know interfaith families in Kehilla for whom Jewish practice is an integral part of their daily lives, and I know families in which everyone was born Jewish and yet Jewish practice is not the central focus of their spirituality.
And beyond that, whether the families are all-born-Jewish or not, Kehilla folks just do not insulate themselves into a Jewish cocoon. Active practicing Jews in Kehilla partake of a variety of non-Jewish practices such as commemorating the Day of the Dead, doing Buddhist meditation, celebrating the weddings of non-Jewish relatives, participating in Christmas parties.
All this brings up a variety of questions. And it will not be our aim at these services to actually answer these questions, but rather to stimulate the process of giving them thought.
These questions include: - Are there any differences between the role of Jews and non-Jews in a proudly multicultural synagogue? - Should we and how do we incorporate spiritual and cultural practices that originate outside of Judaism into our worship? - How does being a member of a multicultural synagogue change my definition of myself as a Jew or as a non-Jew? - What does it mean for me to be an African-American, Asian-American or a Latino member of a synagogue community and how will my other cultural heritage be incorporated into the life of my spiritual community? - How do chauvinism and internalized oppression affect the way we try to answer these questions?
In the interests of time, I have shortened my sermon on these questions. Even in the longer version I did not answer them. But I do want to give a framework though for asking these questions.
The first thing I would like us to keep in mind is that each way we deal with these questions involves an issue concerning where we set our boundaries. In my opinion, the Jewish community has in the past mostly set those boundaries too narrowly, tending toward exclusion. In Kehilla, we are crossing over the old boundaries, but we are probably not eliminating them. The issue before us is where we are to set these boundaries, and to find ways to set them flexibly.
Now the concept of crossing boundaries has great precedence in Judaism. The Hebrew word for Hebrew is Ivri. Ivri means someone who has crossed over. Abraham in our mythos is the first to be called an ivri, and the first command he receives is to cross over and away from that which has been familiar to go somewhere he does not know. He crosses over the river boundaries of the land of his birth and then crosses over the boundaries into a new homeland. Rabbi Gershom Winkler translates Ivri as "boundary-crosser," and that is the very first name that the Israelite people receive.
So we too are crossing over from familiar territory--where we cannot stay--to a new territory that we do not yet know.
Among many other notions, we are putting forward the idea that a synagogue community can embrace and nurture not only born Jews and Jews by choice, but also people who are proud members of a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds and also people who are not Jewish and may never want to be. Now this may be unfamiliar territory in recent Jewish experience, but it is not without precedent.
In the days of the First Commonwealth, from about 1000 BCE to 600 BCE, the Israelite kingdoms incorporated a variety of non-Israelite communities and individuals. The book of Samuel describes King David's general staff as including non-Israelite officers. The book of Leviticus and other books from the Torah repeatedly refer to the treatment of non-Jews within the Israelite community as if this were commonplace. Non-Jews are expressly given the equivalent of what we call today the rights of full citizenship which meant not only that they fully participated in the secular functioning of the society, but also in its religious celebrations and sacrifices. This was so true that--at least among--women the concept of converting to Judaism appears to have been unknown at that time. In the story of Ruth, she never goes through any formalities, she merely decides to share the faith and fate of her mother-in-law.
Even the prophets of that era appear to exhibit anti-gentile sensitivities only in regard to idol-worship. But such prophets as Zechariah, Jeremiah and especially Isaiah envision peace as a time when many peoples can worship together in the same house whether or not they are Jewish. You will see this in tomorrow's special haftara reading especially Isaiah (56:6-9).
After the days of the first Temple, starting with Ezra and Nehemiah, clearer boundaries were drawn between Jew and non-Jew. Rabbinical Judaism maintained this distinction, but, at least in their earlier days, the rabbis were fairly lenient about the process of converting perhaps because several of the rabbis in the first century or two of the common era were converts or the descendants of converts.
Another issue which I want us to think about, is the ways we incorporate practices from outside of Judaism into Kehilla worship. The first thing to note is that such incorporation has been part of normative Judaism for millennia. The form of rhyming poetry used in the most orthodox synagogues was adapted from Islam, Chassidic melodies used Polish folk tunes. These are but two examples. While meditation has been used as a spiritual practice in Judaism for centuries, Jewish meditation, has been influenced by other methodologies, Sufi for hundreds of years, and Buddhist more recently. In Kehilla, we are incorporating American modal forms in our prayer and have used poetry from Christian and other traditions in Bar/Bat Mitzvah services. What other liturgies and methodologies we incorporate will probably be decided on a case-by-case basis.
But what yard stick do we apply to these case-by-case determinations? I cannot tell you that we have worked out anything exact yet. Each spiritual leader in Kehilla is still trying to figure out her or his criteria. But what it comes down to is the following kind of consideration: Kehilla at its core is a center for Jewish spirituality. As multicultural as we are--whether we are Jewish or not--we come to Kehilla for its Jewishness in particular, even if Kehilla's Jewishness is an inclusive and non-chauvinistic Jewishness. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah service is both about coming of age in a universal sense, but it is also about the young person making a decision to take their place as part of the Jewish people. On this basis one spiritual leader may end a Bar/Bat Mitzvah service with Bob Dylan's Forever Young, while another might include the song somewhere in the service, but not end with anything other than Adon Olam.
The place where we experience greater discomfort is finding the appropriate role for non-Jews within the prayer service. Do non-Jews say the Torah blessings during an aliya, or do they participate in the aliya as witnesses? Non-Jews have been active members of the Kehilla Board and would probably be appropriate members in any Kehilla committee. Non-Jews have given and will give sermons and teachings in Kehilla. But would Kehilla welcome non-Jews as permanent spiritual and service leaders?
You look like you're waiting for an answer, but thank God my time is up. I just know that wherever we redraw the boundaries that we have crossed, our criteria cannot be based on Jewish chauvinism, triumphalism, nor "ashkenazocentrism." And neither can it be based on internalized oppression about which we will have to speak another time.
In Psalm 118, there is a verse that we sing. It's on your songsheets #2. It says "Min ha-metzar karati Yah, anani ba-merchav Yah." It means "I cry out to Yah from the narrow constricted place, answer me with Yah's broad open spaces." As we break out from our previous constricted boundaries, let us pray for finding ourselves as individuals and as a community in a world where all our differences and diversity are to be cherished and not to be seen with enmity. Peace will never be found in the elimination of differences, but in preserving diversity with justice and mercy.