1. L’shana Tova U’metuka – I wish everyone a good and sweet New Year.

2. I want to begin by welcoming everyone home. We come from many different places but here we are all home. We may have last been in a synagogue yesterday, last Shabbat, last month, at the end of last season or perhaps we have not been in a synagogue since last year. But I welcome everyone. I welcome those who may be coming to synagogue for the first time in many years. I welcome those of you who are young, and those who are old and all those of ages in between. I welcome those who will be here only three days and those who will join us only for three hours.  I welcome you to synagogue if you have doubts about why you are here, about why you should pray and if you have doubts about God. I welcome to synagogue today both saints and sinners, both scholars and novices and even those who are not sure why they are here but their presence in shul today makes someone they love happy. Look around you. The people sitting next to you, behind you, in front of you, are not really all that different from you. So take a moment to say hello and since we will be together for these holidays, introduce yourself and your family so that for these days we can all be sitting with friends.

3. I want to begin with a story, one of my favorite stories, of a man named Itzik who lived in Cracow. One night he had a dream, a castle, a river and a bridge. The voice said to him: “Itzik, the river is the Danube, the castle is in Budapest and under the bridge is a treasure that is waiting for you….. (Tell story)

4. The reason I like to tell this story is because it has a moral, a teaching that we learn from Itzik and his dreams. The moral of the story is: The treasure is in Cracow but knowledge of the treasure is in Budapest.”  Sometimes, in order to know the treasure that we have, we have to travel far and wide to realize its value and to appreciate its place in our life.

5. I am guessing that our experience of the High Holy Days is probably off to a rocky start. From the moment we arrived, took our seats and picked up the Machzor, we probably started wondering, “What we are doing here?” This book, this Machzor, for most of us, is very strange. The prayers it contains are long and complicated and often it is not clear what these prayers are trying to say. Even if we have come to shul all our lives, this service would still be filled with words that are unfamiliar and prayers that are difficult to understand. Rosh Hashana is not just another service at the synagogue. It is a pageant, a performance and a ritual that places each of us as the central character and the prayers we recite call to each of us in unique and different ways.

6.  But, for the experienced davener and the novice alike, this prayer book, this Machzor, is filled with much that instills within us feelings that are not always so pleasant. Some of us may be confused by the long Hebrew passages that are between familiar prayers. Some of us may be angry at the rampant sexism and nationalism that fills these pages. Some of us may be doubtful that a God who seems to depend so much on praise might have some kind of an influence in our lives, and some may find the words of prayers downright disturbing, and we may wonder, “if there is a God that could do all these terrible things, then why would I want to pray to that God?”

7. So a few comments as I begin. First of all, we are not the first Jews in history to have these problems; some of these prayers have been the source for many questions and concerns over hundreds of years. For a time, Jews were afraid to ask the difficult questions about prayer and they were afraid to change the Machzor since the prayers within the book seemed so old and were considered to be an inheritance from our ancestors. But Jews of old were not so different from us Jews who live in the here and now. We ask the same question, if our ancestors could find meaning in these old prayers, why are these prayers so difficult for us?

8. Rabbi Morris Silverman, and the committee that authored our Machzor, had to make many difficult decisions. The minutes of their meetings tell us that most of the time the committee opted to keep the prayers in their original Hebrew but changed the translations so that they would be more palatable for modern Jews. The first edition of this book was published in the 1940’s, before we understood the horror of the Holocaust and before we experienced the establishment of the State of Israel. It was reprinted in 1951, a world in which genders were carefully defined, divorce was still a shanda and nobody dared to talk about child abuse, civil rights and religious freedom. The great fear was atomic war, not terrorism or rogue states.

9. But all the style and historical issues aside, we come to shul and we want to pray. But these High Holy Day prayers in the Machzor seem so problematic. Even the most iconic prayers for Rosh Hashana, make us at best, a bit queasy, and at most, very uncomfortable with what the prayers say and how they say them. Some of us have been saying these prayers for so many years that we really don’t look at them anymore. But it is not enough to chant the words we pray, they are supposed to become engraved in our hearts. When we take a good hard look at these prayers, we find ourselves starting to become unsure about if we want these words so engraved.

10. There are many examples. We can start with the Unetane Tokef which we will recite in just a few more minutes. Our Musaf service today and tomorrow features a prayer teaching us that on these days, God decides who shall live and who shall die. Is this decision really set at the beginning of the year? For the rest of the year are we just playing out the fate that has been determined over the next ten days? And then it tells us that Teshuva, Tzedaka and Tephilla can avert God’s severe decree. Does this mean that if tragedy and sorrow visit our homes, that we did not pray enough? We didn’t repent enough? We didn’t give enough to Tzedaka?

11. One of my colleagues had these issues rise right to the front of his mind one Rosh Hashana as he looked out at his congregation and saw an 11 year old girl, sitting near the front, whose mother was dying of metatastic breast cancer. What does this little girl experience when she recites this prayer? Will she go home thinking that all the efforts of doctors and family will be of no avail, that her mother’s fate has already been determined? And when her mother died the next week what did that little girl think? Did she learn from Unetane Tokef that perhaps she didn’t pray hard enough? Perhaps she was not sincere in her repentance? Perhaps she should have given more Tzedaka?  Unetane Tokef is one of the central prayers in our Machzor. How do we answer this little girl’s questions and how do we answer our own questions?

12. Take a look at Avinu Malkeynu. Do we really envision God as a king, sitting on a throne up in heaven? Is God that old man in heaven deciding who will be granted pardon or not? Sometimes I think we look at God as some kind of a divine Santa Claus, whose job it is to grant the wishes on our list. The list of prayers that make up Avinu Malkeynu imply that God is arbitrary with God’s bounty. And then, who elected God to be the King of the Universe? Shouldn’t God be like a President rather then a King? And what is this about God being male? What if God is female? Or if God has no gender at all? Why is this prayer so medieval and so sexist?

13. On Yom Kippur we will recite the Al Het, the list of 44 sins for which we repent. But what if we didn’t do all these sins? Why should I feel guilty about the sins of other people? What is this guilt thing that the Machzor wants to place upon me and that I have to literally beat myself up over things I don’t think I have ever been guilty of?

14. And finally, there is Kol Nidre. The prayer that people come from high and low to hear. Hearing the Hazan sing the words can bring us to tears. We really want it to mean something, but the words read more like a contract then a prayer. Does this prayer get us off the hook for promises that we have made, or promises that we will make in the year ahead? Does this prayer imply that Jews don’t keep their promises? Whatever it may have meant to Jews living in Spain and Turkey, what meaning is it supposed to have for us, that we should gather by the thousands to hear Kol Nidre chanted each year?

15. When we sit in our seats and open our Machzor, we find ourselves standing at the gates of prayer. What we find before us, as we enter the gate  – we find that we are confronted with a maze. We try to navigate the maze but all too soon, we find ourselves lost, alone and maybe angry. Where are the directions, where are we supposed to go, when are we supposed to stand and when do we sit? What page number are we on? Where do we buy a Machzor GPS to help us navigate through the maze?

16. When we look in the Machzor and we say we are lost, we are not referring to the television show that ended last season. Although for some of us, prayer leaves us as confused as the famous last episode of LOST.  If we are to find our way, we first have to ask, “What do we usually do when we feel lost? What do we usually do to find our way home?”

17. There are several options. We might try to return to the last place where we were sure of our location. That strategy does not work so well in the spiritual world. We cannot grow if we keep going back to the place we feel secure and comfortable. Growth is only possible when we move forward. Another strategy to use if we are lost could be to just sit down and wait for someone to find us. This strategy, however, also does not work in the world of prayer; it is possible to wait all of our lives and still not be sure of which way to go in prayer.

18. When we are lost in prayer, the best  thing that we can do is to continue to explore the uncharted territory around us. There will be lots of things that are unfamiliar and perhaps we will make some mistakes along the way, but eventually, if we don’t give up, we can find ourselves at home in a new world, a world that gives us a deeper understanding of who we are and where we want to go in life.  Instead of feeling lost, we should see our time in the Machzor as an adventure and use that time to explore the uncharted wilderness, and discover for ourselves what prayer has to teach us.

19.  What happens when we feel alone in the maze of prayer? We are, after all, Americans. We are trained from an early age to be loners. We idolize John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone and maybe Kevin Costner. If we are to make our way through life, and through prayer, we feel like we want to do it all by ourselves. All we should need to find our way should be talent and ingenuity. These should help us  to get through whatever life throws our way. Judaism, however, sees life differently. We live in a community. We pray with a minyan. What is good for the community, Judaism tells us, is good for our self. Selfishness is not a part of our faith.

20. Judaism understands that there are many different ways to pray and our religion does not require us to offer only verbal prayer. When the great modern philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel walked with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, he said of that day that he felt like he was praying with his feet.  When people run to help others, when they comfort the mourners and visit the sick, when they go out of their way to help a neighbor and they take someone who does not drive to the doctor, to the grocery store and to synagogue. These are people who pray with their feet.

21. And there are many other ways that Judaism allows us to pray. When we give money to those in need, when we give clothing to the poor, or even if we don’t have something to give, if we “only” give our friendship and our support, we are praying with our hands. When we lend someone who is unsure on their feet, our arms in support, or when we feed someone who can no longer feed themselves, our hands become our prayer.

22. And when we speak up for Israel or when we protest against hatred and bigotry, when we object to injustice and demand civil rights, when we inspire others to share their ideas to help make the world a better place for everyone, this is how we pray with our minds and our ideas.  Over the course of a year, over the course of a lifetime, Every Jew prays in a way that is unique and right for whatever the situation may be.  At different times in our life we will discover that sometimes we will pray with words, sometimes we will pray with our feet,  sometimes we will pray with our hands and sometimes we will need speak to God through our ideas. As long as we can share our prayers, we will never be alone

23. What if the maze of prayer makes us angry, what should we do? Again, we ask ourselves, what do we usually do when we are angry? Do we yell, complain or throw things around? I guess you can do all those things but I don’t think that they will change the world or our soul very much, throwing things will not help us find our way. Psychologists tell us that when we are angry, we should begin to ask questions, because collecting information helps stop the bad feelings and puts us back in control of our lives.

24. If prayer makes us angry, we need to ask some good questions and make a serious effort to seek the answers. Judaism is centered on study and study is considered a form of prayer. We find in the Talmud the question, “What should one do if one is studying Deuteronomy in the Torah and then suddenly realized that it is time to recite the Shema? Do we need to stop and say the Shema, or does our study of the text count as praying?” The Talmud maintains that study does indeed count as prayer.

25. The late Chancellor of the Seminary, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein used to teach that when he prayed, he talked to God, and when he studied, God spoke to him. We may not always know the right questions to ask and we may not always get an immediate answer, but there is comfort in knowing that we asked good questions. In Judaism, we are taught never to study alone. We are to study in Hevruta, with study partners.  When we share ideas and issues with our partners, only then can we enrich each others learning. And, by the way, there is no law in Judaism that when we are praying, everyone has to be on the same page. What is important when we pray is to encounter our prayers, not keep up with everyone else. When we pray, we don’t have to leave any page until we have contemplated it enough and are ready to move on.

26. In the case of Avinu Malkeynu, The prayer does not have to be sexist. We can look at God, not as our father, but as our parent and we are children of the Divine ruler. Like a parent, perhaps God cannot help us out of all our troubles no matter how much we pray, beg or plead. Perhaps all we can expect from our parents is to hold us when we are afraid and comfort us when we are broken until we are healed. If Avinu Malkenu can do that, then it will have a lasting impact throughout the year.

27. What about Al Het? We may not like the fact that we are made to feel guilty for sins we have not transgressed, but in a Jewish community, we are all responsible for each other. We can’t drill a hole in the bottom of the boat and tell the others with us that they don’t need to pay attention to our actions; after all we are only drilling under our own seat! It may be unfair when someone else sins and our stock portfolio goes down, but if we chose to close our eyes to the abuses around us, we all will suffer the penalties that are the consequences of our refusing to care.

28.  Finally, Kol Nidre has never been about the words. It has always been about the music. Music that has transcended time and location. For centuries we have understood the words to refer not to promises made to other human beings but promises made to God.  Promises to God, however are the most important promises of all, so we should think carefully about what we promise God in our moments of weakness and then, when we do make a promise to God, we should use the commitments we make to sharpen our willpower and strengthen our resolve.

29. We should not be surprised that if we who are here only three days a year find ourselves confused by our Machzor. Only if we are prepared to put some time and effort into our prayers, can we learn to feel better about the words we pray and the about the God whom we address.  Practicing prayer, studying prayer, experiencing prayer will get easier, better and will have more meaning if we perform our spiritual exercises in our synagogue. The Machzor calls us to make this year count. To make it count by growing, each day, in our ability to pray.

30. There is a great story of a Rabbi and a soap-maker taking a walk in the shtetl. The soap-maker says, “I don’t get it Rabbi, The Siddur has been around for hundreds of years and the world is still not a better place than it was before. The Rabbi pointed to a very dirty boy playing in the street. “I don’t get this either, said the Rabbi, how come, after all the soap that is manufactured in the world, this little boy is still so dirty.” The soap-maker replied, “That is not fair, the boy cannot become clean unless he uses the soap.” The rabbi agreed and responded, “and so it is with the siddur, it is only good if people will use it.”

31. In Itzik’s dream, the river is a metaphor for life, the castle represents Torah and the bridge is the synagogue. The treasure of spirituality, of holiness, of prayer, is with us, close at hand, wherever we go and no matter what we may do.  But knowledge of the treasure is found right here in the synagogue. It is found when we dig into the resources of this prayer community. When we gather here to study, when we gather here to pray and when we gather here to celebrate a new year that is beginning. Let us resolve to spend the New Year learning together, sharing life together and helping each other discover the treasure that lies right under our nose. Let us discover God within our souls by visiting our spiritual home, where knowledge of God can always be found.

1. SHABBAT SHALOM

2. Blessings and Curses. This is the content of much of this week’s Parsha. There is a list of blessings if we follow God’s law, and a list of curses for committing sins in secret in the vain hope that we will never be caught. This is followed by a list of good things that will happen if we are faithful to God and a list of disasters if we ignore the teachings of the Torah.

3. There are a number of ways to look at these admonitions. There are a number of ways to deal with the problems that they engender. The first problem is that we know the passage is not true. Our experience tells us that sometimes those who are deserving of blessings don’t get the blessings that are promised. Sometimes those who are deserving of punishment don’t get the curses that are promised. In some ways we have to read this whole difficult passage and sigh, wishing that it were true, that the good would be rewarded and evil will be punished. And we pray that somewhere, in the world to come, this inequality will be made right.

4. In ancient times, when the first and second Temples were destroyed, the people turned to these admonitions and declared that it was not that their enemies had defeated them. The defeat was because God did not fight for them. God did not fight for them because they no longer were true to the teachings of Torah. It was not the strength of the enemy, but the guilt of the people that brought about tragedy and they could only hope that if they became more attached to the Mitzvot of the Torah, they would merit blessings and eventually, the restoration of the Temple and homeland. We repeat this message on holidays when we recite in our Musaf service, “Mip’nai Hatotaynu Galinu MeArtzenu, “because of our Sins we were exiled from our land.” For our ancestors in medieval Europe, and those who lived during the emancipation, these words reminded them that their actions do count in the halls of heaven. But we who live in the shadow of the Holocaust, we understand that there are no sins so terrible that such a tragedy should befall our people. That our sins could never be as bad as to warrant the death of six million innocent Jews, including one million children. There are some theologians who say we should change the words of the Musaf rather than repeat what amounts to blasphemy. There is no sin that could bring on such pain and there is no blessing that could ever comfort us for what we have lost.

5. Rabbi Abigail Trau, a teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, calls our attention to the fact that God tells us in this Parsha, that if we will LISTEN to what God tells us, all will be well and if we refuse to LISTEN, then death and tragedy will follow. She remembered a rabbi who once taught her by explaining that, unlike our eyes and mouth, our ears are always open. We cannot close our ears to the sounds around us. So it is therefore up to us, in our inner lives, to decide HOW to listen.

6. According to Rabbi Trau, the condition of our emotional state is about what takes place “inside” us no matter the conditions and happenings of our physical lives “outside”. We can’t control what happens to us but we have control over our happiness. We can walk through life with our hearing attuned to the negative or we can devote our hearing to things that are Godly.

7. This is an important lesson to remember at this season of the year, when we begin to examine our souls in preparation for the High Holy Days. This is a time of Heshbone HaNefesh, the taking of a personal inventory of what has happened in the past year and what we need to do to get back to being right with our friends, our neighbors and with God. Over the course of the days and weeks ahead, we will review all the sins we have committed and will strike our chest in contrition for the wrongs we have done. The list of Al Het that we will recite over and over again on Yom Kippur, pierces our hearts as we realize we could have done better last year, and we failed. This season is a sobering reminder that we are far from perfect and far from walking the path laid out for us by God.

8. This review of the last year can be really depressing. Last year we promised ourselves and God that we would do better, and now, at the end of the year, we find that we are as far away from our goal today as we were last Yom Kippur, if not farther away. All the efforts to repent our sins and live a better life just didn’t work out the way we wanted them to, and we feel guilty, and deserving of at least some of the curses that fill the greater part of our Parsha.

9. I have an exercise that I like to do with those who feel that there is no end to the mistakes and sins that they have performed over the course of the year. I hold up a large white sheet of paper with a small black dot in the middle and ask, “What do you see?” Almost everyone replies, “I see a black dot”. I tell them that the dot is insignificant, what this is, is a perfectly good piece of white paper. For most people, the one small dot makes the whole sheet of paper unusable. We need to concentrate sometimes, not on the flaws, but on the greater part of life that is untouched by sin.

10. I don’t want a show of hands, but think about this for a moment. How many of us can say that we broke even one of the Ten Commandments this year? Did we worship graven images? Did we not honor our parents? Did we commit murder or adultery? Did we lie, steal or covet? Maybe we could have honored Shabbat more, but did we at least come to shul, bless Shabbat candles or eat a Shabbat meal? But even if you don’t feel that you observed Shabbat enough to get credit for the Mitzvah, that still leaves you with a 90% success rate for the Ten Commandments. The greatest baseball players are only successful 33% of the time!

11. The prayer, Al Het, lists some forty-four sins that we need to repent on Yom Kippur. But if you read the list, how many can we really say we are personally guilty of transgressing. Five or ten? That still gives us a seventy five percent success rate for the past year. (Aren’t statistics wonderful?) While it is important for our growth to work on making the number of sins in our life as small as possible, we should at least acknowledge that our lives are not totally wicked. We have come a long way in life, and that path has not been wasted just because we are not yet perfect.

12. In fact, the only perfection in this imperfect world is God. No matter how perfect we wish to be, we will never find the ultimate perfection that we find in our Creator. God knows we are not perfect, God knows that while we mean well, we often fall short of the standards that God sets for us and that we set for ourselves. This is why God is so forgiving; the issue is not whether or not we are perfect, the issue is how hard we are trying to be better.

13. There is a famous story about a woman walking on the beach after a storm. She sees a man in the distance and she can’t quite make out what he is doing. As she gets closer, she sees that he is throwing something into the ocean. As she gets even closer, she sees that he is picking up the starfish that have washed ashore in the storm and is throwing them back into the sea. She approaches him and asks, “What are you doing?” He replies, “These starfish will die if they are out of the water too long so I am throwing them back into the sea.” The woman was astounded, “”But don’t you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!” The man then picked up another starfish and threw it back into the sea, “It makes a difference to that one!”

14. Every action in our lives makes a difference. To a friend, to a neighbor, to a stranger and to God. Every effort we make is important. Every time we fail, we get another chance to learn from our mistakes and try harder or try something different the next time around. As long as we try, we are blessed with opportunities to try again. When we stop trying and give up, only then do we have to face the curses and warnings that are so much a part of this week’s Parsha.

15. Remember also what Rabbi Trau taught, that what is important is not what is outside but how we feel on the inside. We can experience many difficulties in life. What is important is not what happens, but how we feel about them. We can focus on where we failed, or we can focus on what we did right. We can bemoan the fact that we did not do a perfect job, or we can be happy from whatever good we have brought into the world.

16. We will never feed all those who are hungry. We will never visit everyone who is sick. We will never be able to give enough clothing to the poor or find housing for all the homeless. But we can lend a hand to someone who has fallen. We can cheer up one person who is feeling down. We can put a sandwich into the hand of someone who is hungry and we can give respect to someone who is feeling alone. What difference will our small gesture make in the grand scheme of the world? It doesn’t matter, it will make a difference to the ones we help.

17. So take some time over the next few weeks and consider, not how far you have to go but how far you have already come. Stop looking at the dot on the page of your life, the imperfection that stands out so clearly and see all the white space, the good that you have been able to do. Take a look not only where you sinned, but look also at the many places you actually performed Mitzvot. That should be all the blessing you will need to get started on making your improvements for the year ahead.

18. True happiness is not in having never failed, having never sinned; happiness is knowing that every day, in many ways, large and small, we are getting better and better at living a holy life.

May God help us improve in the year ahead, and may God bless us for all the good in our lives, as we say …

AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM

Shabbat Shalom

The story out of Israel last week was the arrest of two Rabbis from a religious settlement on the West Bank who had written a book in which they made a Halachic ruling, a ruling of Jewish Law, that it is permitted to kill a non-Jew. It was not permitted to perform random acts of murder but, according to the article in Israel’s newspaper, Haaretz, “According to Shapira, (one of the rabbis arrested) it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed.” This is the “Torah” they published in their book.

These two rabbis, teachers at the “Od Yosef Hai yeshiva, have a long history of inciting Jews to kill Arabs. One was recently arrested as part of an investigation into the burning of a Mosque in a nearby village. The Rabbis of the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva have long been in favor of scrapping the government of Israel and replacing it with a religious monarchy. In fact, two other rabbis were also ordered to appear before the police who are investigating this case and they refused to appear saying that they do not accept the jurisdiction of the police in this matter as Haaretz reported, “In a written statement that aired on Channel 2 …, (Rabbis) Lior and Yosef wrote: “The investigation is contrary to the laws of the Torah – therefore we will not take part in it.”

Let me first make one thing crystal clear. It is forbidden for a Jew to kill anyone, Jew or non-Jew at any time or for any reason. The only exception is if someone, Jew or non-Jew were to physically attack you, you can defend yourself and stop the attack and if the attacker should die from your defense, you are not guilty of murder.

I have not read Rabbi Shapira’s book, but I am reasonably sure that he is ruling that this kind of self defense can be expanded to include all who speak in a disparaging voice against Israel. And I am also reasonably sure that he does not extend that permission to kill Jews who speak against Israel. Rabbis who hold positions such as these often make a distinction between Jews and non-Jews.

We learned in last week’s parsha that when waging war, one can kill the male population of a city that you are at war with. One cannot kill women and children, or even cut down the trees that surround the city. If the city surrenders without a battle, then nobody in the city can be killed when they surrender. Shoftim then goes on to say however, that the Canaanites who are living in the land must be exterminated; men, women and children lest they ensnare Israel with their worship of false gods. We who live in the shadow of the Holocaust, where we the Jews, were victims of such a campaign of extermination, have a hard time seeing our ancestors waging a similar war of extermination against others. The later books of the Bible record that this extermination was never really performed and the issue of Israel being enticed into the paganism of the Canaanites was an ongoing problem until the Philistines arrived on the scene and became a much greater threat to the people of Israel.

So where does this murderous hatred of non-Jews come from? If Jewish law is clear that a human being cannot be killed without a trial and a conviction, why are there so many Jews who think that these rules only apply to Jews, and that all of Jewish Law, from business law to murder, does not apply if the victim is not a member of our faith? Why do we have this ever present hatred of Christians and Muslims that seems to go against the lessons of the Book of Genesis and against most of Rabbinic Law? Clearly one God created us all. Clearly we are all brothers, descended from the first human being, Adam. In parshat Noach, we learn that there are some laws of basic decency that are incumbent upon both Jews and non-Jews. One of these so called, “seven commandments of Noah” teach that it is forbidden to murder anyone, and that there must be fair and impartial judges in a community. Only God is permitted to shed human blood.

Much of the hatred that Jews have to non-Jews comes from centuries of oppression by the majority religions in Europe and the Middle East. Christianity and Islam were both very hard on the Jews who lived among them. In Europe, sometimes we were promised protection but when we were attacked, the protection never came. Sometimes we were victims of political systems looking for a scapegoat to divert attention from the depravity and injustice of the current administration. Sometimes religious leaders incited hatred for Jews to establish Christian leadership credentials or to promote obedience from the members of the church. Islamic countries were not often better. At first Jews were accepted as a brother religion of monotheism and not included in Islam’s hatred of all that was pagan. But as time went by, Jews were persecuted and killed over their refusal to adopt the Islamic faith. A golden age of Judaism in Islamic countries was all too soon followed by a time of persecution and expulsion that devastated the Jewish communities of the Middle East.

Modern times have brought about many changes in the world. The Catholic church pronounced almost 50 years ago that Jews should not be persecuted, that Judaism was a sister religion and that anti-Semitism was a sin. Virtually all Christian denominations forbid discrimination and persecution because of one’s faith, including Judaism, and while the evangelical denominations would still like nothing more then to convert Jews to Christianity, many of them stand together with us in supporting Israel. Believe it or not, there are a vast majority of Muslims around the world who do not hate Jews at all and do not preach the destruction of Israel. For example, do you know which country has the largest Muslim population in the world? That’s right, Indonesia. A nation that does not regularly preach the destruction of Israel. In fact there are quite a few states with large Muslim populations that actually have diplomatic relations with Israel, including Egypt and Jordan.

The problem with Rabbi Shapira and others who make their pronouncements against non-Jews is that they are the purveyors of what has become a nasty kind of bigotry. That it is okay today to do to “them” what “they” once used to do to us. Now that we have our own state, and an army to back us up, we don’t have to fear non-Jews anymore. We can add back into the Aleynu prayer the passage that Christian authorities banned because it offended Christians. It still offends Christians, and we have lived without the verse for hundreds of years but for some who are still angry over that one act of censorship, for them it is time we rubbed back in their face that they don’t run our lives anymore.

It would all be rather silly if it were not for Rabbi Shapria and the Rabbis of Od Yosef Hai who agree with his Halachic opinion as explained in his book. Non-Jews do not have civil rights in the eyes of these Rabbis. Non-Jews do not deserve due process of the law, mercy or understanding. We can burn their houses of worship like they used to burn ours. We can kill them at will because they used to kill us for no good reason. It does not matter to the Rabbis of Od Yosef Hai if the criticism of a non-Jew against Israel is valid or not, no matter if the Gentile has good motives or bad: in the minds of these rabbis, the only good Goy is a dead Goy.

This is such a gross distortion of Judaism that I am almost unable to call these men Rabbis. They cloak the same vile hatred that was once used against us in the guise of Jewish Law. There is no such law. There is no such permission in Judaism to burn a mosque, to cheat a Christian or to kill any non-Jew who might speak out against Israel. Rabbis who teach this kind of discrimination not only endanger the entire Jewish People with their Hillul HaShem but they drive more and more Jews away from the faith of their fathers because of teachers like these who preach a religion of bigotry and hatred. Such a religion is not Judaism and I will oppose all who teach otherwise.

And let me turn for a moment to the other discrimination against Moslems that is happening in this country. Somebody wrote to me this week amazed that President Obama and New York Mayor Bloomberg, were so out of touch with the majority of Americans that they supported building a mosque at “ground zero”. First of all, the mosque is blocks away from “ground zero”. But more to the point, it really doesn’t matter if our president and the mayor of New York were out of touch with 100% of all Americans. The law is clear. The government of this country has no right to tell the followers of any religion where they can or cannot build a house of worship. There must be compliance with all proper zoning rules, but the first amendment of the constitution gives all religions the freedom to worship without government interference. That includes Muslims in New York. If today we say they have no right to build their mosque in one place, it will only be a matter of time when someone will be opposed to Jews building a synagogue near someplace else. This site is not even within sight of “ground zero”. Let us not get involved in this kind of nasty discrimination.

There are many kinds of people in the world. Some of them I understand and some live the kinds of lives that make no sense to me. Sometimes people do kind things that make me proud to be a human being. Sometimes they do things that so horrify me that I want to make sure that they do not corrupt all of society. But civil rights are just that, civil rights. Every person, whether I agree with them or not, is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are all entitled to a court system that is fair and unbiased. We are all entitled to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from want. We are all entitled to make an honest living, have equal pay for equal work and equal benefits of society. If Israel wants to call herself a democratic country, then those who advocate the murder of others, even if the speakers are rabbis, they deserve to be arrested and tried by a court for criminal incitement. Those who insist on discriminating against others will soon find that others will feel free to discriminate against them. If bigotry is a sin, then it is a sin for everyone, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.

Before any of us take a stand on matters of discrimination, let us always first consider how we would feel if we were the ones being discriminated against. There are still plenty of ethical issues to discuss, but let us not deny civil rights to any human being. Not too long ago, Nazis considered Jews to be vermin, and used a potent insecticide to exterminate six million of our people. Let us make sure that we are never accused of doing the same to someone else.

May God bless us with compassion and understanding for all people all over the world and may our lives be filled with acts of kindness and care for Jews and non-Jews alike as we say…

AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM.

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Our Parsha begins with a very famous verse. “See, I set before you this day blessing and curse; blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.”

3. Clearly, we have an obligation to follow the laws of the Torah. The entire purpose of the Torah is to teach us what God expects of us and what exactly we each need to do in order to live a righteous and pious life. It is not a law that is supposed to be a burden to us, rather the law is supposed to help us create a better world. But as we have seen over the past weeks, trying to understand what God and the Torah expect from us is not easy.

4. We have seen over the past two weeks, Conservative Judaism teaches us that the laws of the Torah have to be able to change in order for the laws to still be a living part of our life. The laws of the Torah have to be open to new interpretations and sometimes they need to be extended; other times they need to be limited in how they affect our lives. We have seen how the laws of the Torah are extended to include women as active participants in Jewish life. We have seen how Jewish law was restricted so that we would not have to deal with laws relating to sacrifices and the hereditary priesthood. Last week we noted that God speaks to us every day, extending the words of Torah through a deeper understanding of how we should apply the law. The Torah was not given just one time, long ago at Sinai. It is given to each of us every day, and we need to pay attention to the direction it is taking us as we struggle to find our way in this modern world using our ancient faith.

5. This Shabbat we will answer a third question. If the law is not fixed for all time and the word of God is heard in every generation, what is it that we, as Conservative Jews are supposed to do? How are we supposed to know how to live a Jewish life, especially since it all seems so fluid all the time? If we want blessings and if we want to avoid the curse that is mentioned in our Parsha this week, we need to know what is expected in the life of a Conservative Jew.

6. Since we don’t follow what is written blindly, it is hard to explain how being a Conservative Jew is supposed to work. If we take a look at our members, we can see that there is a very, very wide range of practice that can be found in our movement. Just looking around this congregation we are aware that there are some here who do not accept a changing role for women in the service. We can also observe that there are some women who have decided to wear a tallit in prayer. Some of us keep kosher homes, some of us eat only kosher food outside our homes, some of us don’t require all of our food to have kosher supervision and some of us don’t seem to care at all about what we can and cannot eat. So where do we come together? Where does this wide range of observance take us as we look to define what being a Conservative Jew is all about?

7. Unlike Orthodox and Reform Jews, we are not defined merely by our practice. Our movement is pluralistic, which means we accept Jews wherever they may be on the spectrum of observance. We don’t want to chase anyone away from finding a path to God. We certainly don’t want to ridicule anyone who finds comfort and meaning in Jewish ritual and observance. There are many reasons that people increase or decrease the level of their observance. The Masorti way is to give everyone the space to find their own way. So what is our philosophy of Jewish practice? What do we teach our members about living an observant life?

8. The first thing we desire in Conservative Judaism is that each Jew be a willing participant. Judaism today will not work very well if our members join us kicking and screaming that they don’t want to be here. Someone who does not care about Judaism, Torah or God just will not make a good Conservative Jew. This is not to say that one has to like everything about Judaism, but we have to be positive that Judaism is the right path for our life. We have to believe that Jewish prayer is our preferred way to express our spirituality; that Jewish law has something to say about how we live our lives; and that Jewish morality is the base upon which we want to build the relationships that matter in our life.

9. Nothing that is Jewish should be foreign or alien to someone who is a part of our movement. The first place we go when we have questions is to see what our tradition has to say about them. When we are planning our lives, we should do so around Shabbat and Jewish holidays. No matter what the issue may be, a Conservative Jew must first turn to our tradition as the baseline for how he or she should respond to the matter at hand. But being willing is not just about decisions about living life; it includes surrounding ourselves with Jewish music, art and culture.

10. This leads us to the second thing we teach: a Conservative Jew must be learning. I have guided a large number of people who were looking to convert to Judaism for all kinds of reasons. I make sure to let them know that if they want to learn everything there is to know about Judaism, then they should realize that it will take 80 or so YEARS to acquire all that knowledge. I tell them that so I will not scare them off. We who have grown up Jewish know that it could take many lifetimes to acquire all one needs to know. Therefore, we need to be constantly learning what Torah has to teach us; how the Rabbis and Sages have interpreted the laws of Torah in every generation; how the law can be applied in situations that affect our lives and the extended life of all those in our community.

11. Listening to your Rabbi’s sermon is one way of learning. Reading books from the library or buying them from the Judaica section of Barnes and Noble is another way. The classic form of learning in Judaism is sitting in a classroom and discussing the issues with a teacher and with classmates. In the discussions themselves we can often find the word of God. I know that there are some of you here who don’t like it at all when I come off the bima to engage in discussion with the congregation. And yet, that is the traditional way to learn, as we struggle together to understand the difficult concepts we have to master. Once we understand the concepts, it is easier to make the choices about how we will live our lives.

12. If we are really willing to make Jewish values the foundation of our life, we need to be learning so we know how Judaism can strengthen that foundation. This is not to say that Judaism has all the answers for the problems of life, but our faith remains a place we can turn to first to see how our ancestors responded to the similar situations. Not only should our homes have Jewish art, but to be a learning Jew, we also need to fill our homes with Jewish books.

13. Finally, a Conservative Jew must also be a striving Jew. We do not permit ourselves to say that “I have done enough”. Each day we have to be open to new lessons and then be open to how those lessons can change our life. There are no Jews who have become so pious that they can not improve their lives. Each and every day is an opportunity to learn something new and to try something new. If someone does not keep kosher, perhaps it is time to start just by buying kosher meat. If one does not keep Shabbat, perhaps one can grow by keeping Shabbat for just a few hours, long enough to have a Shabbat dinner, with candles, wine and challah. We don’t have to jump into ritual and mitzvot in their entirety; we only need to strive to do more.

14. One of the great modern Jewish philosophers was Franz Rosenzweig He discovered his Judaism later in his life and slowly grew in his understanding of the faith and in the way he practiced his religion. Sometimes someone would challenge him, asking if he was now observant and practicing all the mitzvot. Rosenzweig always responded, “not yet!” He understood that what was important in Judaism was less about where you ended up and more about how you get there. Rosenzweig was, in this sense, a good Conservative Jew.

15. This clearly constitutes one of the most striking differences between Conservative and Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews see the mitzvot as a recipe in a cookbook. All we need to do is perform the right deeds at the right time in the right order and inevitably, we will end up religious. Just like if you combine eggs, flour, water and a few other ingredients and inevitably you will end up with a cake. Conservative Jews see mitzvot more like a work of art, and that each of us has to paint the picture in our own way. There is no one way to create art; the final product is in the hand of the artist.

16. We now see exactly how our movement places itself in the Jewish world. Rather than accept Halacha blindly or to reject Halacha blindly, we place ourselves in a completely different position. It is not at all about what we observe, it is more about if we are willing to make Judaism the central pillar in our life; if we are learning more every day about the way Judaism can and does color our view of the world, and then strive every day to grow in our learning and in our commitment to living a Jewish life. This is why so many Conservative Jews are in so many different places. What ties us together is the direction we travel in life, the commitment to learn as much as we can along the way and the striving to go a bit further on our Jewish road every day, a road that we believe will help us live a meaningful life and bring us closer every day to God.

May God bless us with a long life so we will willingly learn more as we strive to live better lives… and let us say, Amen

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Last Shabbat, in response to the crisis in Israel over who is a Jew, we took a look at what it means to be a Conservative/Masorti Jew. After all, if we expect the members of Israel’s Knesset to understand our needs and our commitment to Judaism, Israel and Jewish Law, we need to understand ourselves what we mean when we say, “I am a Conservative Jew!” Last Shabbat I talked about how we look at Jewish Law. I noted that for Jewish Law to be alive, it must be able to change. It has always changed and we just continue that fundamental concept in our Movement. We believe in tradition, but when the law needs to be changed so that it can help us to live better, more meaningful lives, we believe that changing Jewish law is a requirement that we must not ignore.

3. There is another side to our Movement as well. It is not in the practical, day to day observance of Judaism, but more in the philosophic area. Being a Jew has a lot to do with our actions in the world, but being a Jew also must deal with what we believe. What we do must be based on what we believe, and what we believe must play out in what we do. For example, Jews believe in one God, no more, and no less. We do not believe that we are on our own nor do we believe that we are at the mercy of conflicts in the universe between competing gods. This fundamental belief makes possible our commitment to justice. Our belief in one god, makes it possible for us to act with justice in the world.

4. So how are Conservative Jews different from other Jews? The point of difference is not how many gods there are in our faith. The issue is about how that God communicates the Divine will to human beings. Jews consider the Torah as the record of what God has commanded the Jewish people (and what God has commanded other people as well). According to the Torah, the Divine will was communicated to our people when they stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The Torah said that God spoke to the people of Israel and to Moses and the result was the contents of our Torah scroll.

5. Modern philosophers tell us that in our time, there are really only two types of Jews. Those who believe that the record in the Torah is literally true, and those who do not. The literalists tell us that we have no right to change one letter, or one vowel of the text of the Torah because it is Divine in origin and it represents the words that our ancestors heard at Sinai. The non-literalists also believe that the Torah is the record of God’s communication with human beings, but that communication did not occur at Mount Sinai. The Torah is the record of all the ways we have heard the words of God over hundreds if not thousands of years. Over time, the record of this communication was edited into the Torah that we read today.

6. It would be easy if we could just prove one way or the other if the Torah is true or not. Unfortunately, there is no proof one way or the other. There are no other accounts of what happened at Sinai or if Sinai even happened at all. One of the weird things about the Torah is the fact that we have no historical evidence of anything in the Bible until after the death of King Solomon. Does this mean that the Torah is not true? Does it mean that it is all fiction? Does it mean that there was no Moses, Abraham or King David? The honest answer is that we just don’t know. Anyone who says one way or the other is taking the matter on faith, not on any historical basis.

7. So does this mean that the Torah is not true? Well, that depends on what you consider to be the truth. Literalists believe that the Torah is not only a true account of what God said to us but that it is historically true as well. But if we think about it, historical accuracy does not change at all the truth of the lessons in the Torah. Abraham’s legacy of faith and hospitality, Moses’ struggle to help us learn how to stop being slaves and start acting like free people all do not depend on historical accuracy. Whether or not our ancestors stood at Sinai does not make the Ten Commandments any less important or compelling.

8. The literalists tell us that if God did not speak to us with clear words at Sinai, then the Torah is just a collection of good ideas that people had and would therefore have no authority to command us on how we should live our lives. Non-literalists believe that the Torah is a Midrash, the master story, as to how our ancestors viewed their relationship to God. It may have been written by human hands, but clearly there is Divinity in every Mitzvah, indeed in every letter. How God communicated with us is an interesting question, but we believe that God did speak to us and the Torah is our story as to how we understand that communication.

9. Last Shabbat we read again, the words of the Ten Commandments. But according to the Torah, how many of them were actually spoken by God? The Torah is not very clear. At first it seems to say that God spoke “all these words”, but later it says that the people first heard God and were very frightened and told Moses that he should listen to God and then tell the people what God said. If you look at the commandments, you see that the first two commandments are written as if God spoke them, but the other eight are written in the “third person” as if they were communicated to the people by Moses. Some sages in the Talmud wrote that all the people heard at Sinai was the first commandment, that the second one was also given to the people by Moses. Actually it is really hard to figure out what the second commandment really is but that is a different lesson for a different day. I have always been intrigued by the lesson of one Hasidic Rabbi who said that perhaps all the people heard at Sinai was the first word, “Anochi” the Divine declaration of self. And then he goes on to say that perhaps all the people heard was just the first letter of the first word of the commandments. What letter is that? “Aleph” and what is the sound of an Aleph? It is the one letter that has no sound!

10. Does that mean our ancestors listened for God’s voice and heard nothing? I don’t think so. Our Tradition tells us that each person at Sinai, and the people who lived before Sinai and all those destined to be born after Sinai, they all heard the voice of God. That each person heard it in their own language and in a way that they could clearly understand it. That at the moment that God spoke, the world was completely silent. Perhaps what they heard, they did not “hear” with their ears. Perhaps they only heard the voice of God through their hearts. Elijah wanted to hear God’s voice and only heard a still small voice. A murmuring sound that perhaps he felt in his heart and which was not audible through his ears. Like I said, the Torah is not very clear on all of this, perhaps because how God speaks, is not the same as the way we speak.

11. Everyone here has been listening to Rabbis preach about the Torah for most of our lives. Does it really make any real difference in the truth of those lessons if the Torah was one original document or a redaction of four different historical documents? We who read many different newspapers and listen to different television programs so that we can put the information together and learn the truth, do we really think that even the Torah was not compiled from the lessons of many people over a long period of time? Rather than discredit the truth of the Torah, these different sources testify to the eternal truths of the Torah that were evident over a long span of time.

12. The difference in belief then colors the way we view the world. God’s teachings were not limited to Sinai, but have spoken to us in every generation including our own generation. When we study Torah and seek to learn the truth in what it has to say, we are participating in an act of revelation as important as the one recorded in the Torah. Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, the former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary summarized this idea when he wrote, “When I pray, I talk to God. When I study, God talks to me.” Revelation is not a record of something that happened long ago, it is an ongoing conversation that we can have with God when we sit down and study the words of Torah.

13. I admit that this way of understanding God and Torah will not work very well if we still consider God to be just like Michelangelo painted him on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. If we think of God as an old man with a long beard sitting on a throne in heaven, then a historical understanding of Torah will not resonate with that theology very well. But we don’t think of God as being far away in Heaven, but a part of our very existence. If we consider God to be close by and caring about who we are and how we live our lives, then we can also understand how the words of Torah can shape our lives even if we cannot prove the historical accuracy of the text.

14. Our non-literal view of the Torah helps us understand God as being a close and personal part of our lives. God is therefore always close at hand, in good times and in bad times. God rejoices with us when we celebrate and cries with us in our hour of sadness and despair. We can always count on God and we live our lives so that God can count on us, to bring justice, mercy, kindness and compassion into the world, just as God commanded us to do in the Torah. This is the essence of our belief and content of the brit, the covenant that we have with our Creator.

15. May everyday bring us closer to God and closer to living a Godly life, not with blind faith in a text, but in the greater faith that comes when we open our minds and hearts to hear God’s voice as it commands us as it commanded our ancestors.

Amen and Shabbat Shalom

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. Last Shabbat I asked our congregation to join with Conservative Jews all over the world to protest the Rotem Conversion bill. Thanks to all of you who sent the Prime Minister an e-mail. By Sunday Netanyahu had received 25,000 emails protesting the vote from Masorti and another 25,000 from the Federation website. By the end of the day, the Prime Minister had spoken up to kill the conversion bill and pledged to work to find a better solution for Russian Jews and for American Jews. There still is much that must be done, and we cannot let our guard down, but for now, the crisis is past.

3. It continues to amaze me that the members of Israel’s K’nesset still don’t understand Conservative Judaism and what we stand for. Our movement is constantly in the Israeli news and we lobby the K’nesset regularly. Other than the fact that the Orthodox factions run political parties, we don’t seem to be able to get very far in letting lawmakers know who we are and what our issues in Israel are.

4. But maybe the problem is less about Israel and more about Conservative Judaism in America. How many of us here today could speak up about what our movement is and what we believe? What would we say, that we are “not Orthodox but not Reform”? That we are “in the middle” of the denominations? How many of us really understand the philosophy and significance of Conservative Judaism?

5. In this week’s Parsha, Moses tells the People of Israel that he has given them a good law, that they should not add to it nor subtract from it, but they should follow all of its teachings. We can easily see why Moses would say this. These words, after all, were given to us by God. Who are we to change the law? What right do we have to amend the Torah? The Torah is filled with examples of disaster when God’s words were not followed. Why should we add or subtract from them to suit our needs?

6. And yet, from the very moment that the Torah became the foundation of law for Judaism, Rabbis have been adding and subtracting to the laws of the Torah. Have you ever been married by a Rabbi? If so, all of the laws of marriage were additions to the Torah. There is no place in the Torah where it tells us how we are supposed to get married. Do you light candles on Shabbat? Shabbat and Festival candles are also not found in the Torah, They too were added later by the Rabbis. There is no place in the Torah that teaches us to pray three times a day, or that the morning service is required. Rosh Hashana is not found in the Torah. Neither is Purim or Hanukah. The format for a Blessing is not from the Torah. There is nothing about funeral services in the Torah. The Torah does not know from second day Yom Tov either. For that matter, the Torah tells us that we must not work on Shabbat, but it never says what its definition of work should be. The laws of working on Shabbat were all added to the law.

7. If you were a trained lawyer, you understand that as soon as a law code is written down, there will need to be changes. Laws have to be interpreted, so people can understand them. As situations change, the law has to change to fit new situations and new circumstances. Sometimes laws have to be amended. Sometimes there needs to be new laws. Sometimes laws must be removed from the books. A law code that does not change will quickly become useless, irrelevant and dead. A living law must be able to change.

8. Everyone knows that the Torah has 613 Mitzvot; 613 laws that make up the core of all that Judaism stands for. There are 248 positive commandments and 365 negative commandments. Or are there? Many of the Mitzvot deal with sacrifices. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore so we don’t pay any attention to these Mitzvot. Some of the Mitzvot have to do with the way Kohanim serve in the Temple. We don’t have a Temple with Kohanim anymore so these Mitzvot no longer are valid. According the Hafetz Hayim, who died in 1933, there are only 77 positive Mitzvot that we follow and 194 negative Mitzvot. In addition there are 26 Mitzvot that only apply to Jews who live in Israel. That leaves us with only 297 Mitzvot. The rest have been removed from the law.

9. Given this understanding of the law, we can better understand what Conservative Judaism is all about. We do not believe that Jewish Law was fixed at any point in time. We do not believe that the Talmud, the Mishna Torah, The Shulchan Aruch nor the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch have fixed Jewish law for all time. The same forces that have always shaped Jewish Law still shape it. Torah and Halacha are like a growing tree. Sometimes there are limbs that die out and fall off, sometimes there are new branches and leaves that grow. It does not change all at once, like the Reform movement tries to do, but it grows organically, building on the roots and branches that have come before.

10. Conservative Judaism also says that there may not be uniformity about how or when the law changes. Different Jews have different opinions (imagine that!) and different Rabbis also do not agree (what a surprise!). Sometimes only time will tell which Rabbi or group of Rabbis were correct. So we rarely make definitive changes in the law. More often, we record the opinion of the Majority and the opinion of the Minority so future generations will see what we have done and can best decide what they should do for their time and circumstances. When a decision is needed, the Rabbi of that place, the Mara D’Atra, is given the duty to examine the laws as they exist and decide what would be the best course for the Jews in that community.

11. The participation of women in Jewish life is one area of change that we understand very well. An examination of the laws relating to the role of women in ritual life shows clearly that it does not reflect the words of Torah; nowhere in the Torah does it limit the role of women in Jewish rituals. Just read about Deborah, Miriam, Hannah and the matriarchs and you can see that they would not recognize the laws of Mechitza, Kol Isha and the prohibition of counting women in the Minyan. We know from our study that the laws relating to women were developed in relation to the realities of ancient societies. When those realities changed, when women started taking a more active role in secular society, there needed to be similar changes in religious law as well. A modern woman who fights discrimination in American society should not have to be told that she should accept discrimination in the religious world.

12. It is important to note that just because some laws have needed to change, it does not mean we have abandoned Halacha altogether. The laws of Kashrut still apply. We still can’t eat lobster or ham. The laws of Shabbat still apply, we still must not write, pay bills or wash the car on Shabbat. We still have to eat Matzah on Pesach, build a Sukkah on Sukkot and fast on Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur. We still have to be kind to strangers, heal the sick, feed the hungry and clothe those in need. We are still not permitted to murder, commit adultery, lie, steal or covet. We may need to change some laws, but we also have to uphold the rest of the tradition that does not change. Or as one Conservative Rabbi put it. “We can argue if sturgeon or swordfish have scales or not and if they are kosher or not, but that still does not make oysters and clams permitted.”

13. Every change is not a sign of Reform Judaism. Standing by the tradition does not make one Orthodox. There is Tradition and there is Change, and Conservative Jews believe in both. We believe that changes must support the other requirements of the Tradition.

14. Our flexibility allowed us to be Zionists long before Orthodox and Reform Jews accepted Zionism. Our commitment to tradition has enabled us to prevent a major break with world wide Judaism. Our insistence on scholarship has made our Rabbis and universities known all over the world. We strongly oppose religious fundamentalism and we are strong supporters of religious pluralism. We don’t believe that we have the only path to God. We think that religion should not become political, neither in Israel nor in the United States.

15. Conservative Judaism believes that we are the descendants of the Rabbis in every age that molded the laws of the Torah to fit the needs of their generation. There is nothing to be ashamed of in Conservative Judaism. We should bear the title proudly. Those who speak loudest against us are the ones most frightened by the positions we take. We call ourselves Conservative Jews because we are committed to conserving our heritage, and that takes both Tradition and Change.

16. May our Torah always be our Tree of Life, as well as a Living Tree. May God bless us with the wisdom and courage to keep our faith growing and changing as we say…

Amen and Shabbat Shalom

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. This week, we will observe the great black fast of Tisha B’Av. It is not only the day we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, but the day we commemorate many disasters which befell our people at this time of the year. The Midrash traces the beginning of this infamous day as the date that the spies returned to our ancestors in the wilderness, telling them that the land was a good land but that the Canaanites were too strong for Israel to be able to defeat them. That night, says the Midrash, the people cried because they would never be able to enter the Promised Land. God was said to reply to their wailing, “If you cry tonight without reason, I will give you a reason to cry on this day.”

3. It has always surprised me that many of the disasters that befell our people in ancient times on this day were attributed by our Sages to our own faults. We cried without reason, so God gave us a reason to cry. The first Temple was destroyed because of injustice, robbery and disrespect. The second Temple was destroyed by causeless hatred between Jews. To be sure, there are many troubles that we remember on this day that were not the fault of the Jewish People. We did not cause the Spanish Inquisition. We did not cause the Talmud to be burned in Europe. We did not cause blood libels, we did not poison wells and we did nothing to cause our people to be locked up in ghettos in Europe.

4. But the first three things that we commemorate on the fast of Tisha B’Av are disasters of our own making. The way we treated each other brought destruction to our nation and to our people. We often have to admit that sometimes, we are our own worst enemy. Our own cleverness and deceptions often backfire into disasters for our people.

5. If you don’t have a computer, you may not know that as Tisha B’Av approaches this year, we may yet have reason to cry again on this day. A disaster that once again will be brought about by our own people. Just a few weeks ago, I spoke about how the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox in Israel are trying to force their own brand of Judaism on everyone, no matter if they believe in this extreme form of Judaism or not. This week may yet see the next disaster for Israel, one that Israel will bring upon herself.

6. Late last year, Member of Knesset, David Rotem drafted a bill for consideration by Israel’s Parliament that he hoped would help the Russian immigrants to Israel, who have been in limbo for decades, once and for all, resolve the issues of their Jewish status. They pay taxes in Israel, they serve in Israel’s army. They are an important part of Israel’s economy. But they have questionable ancestry to the Haredim of the Chief Rabbinate so they need to be converted to resolve these questions. There are tens of thousands of Russian Jews who are waiting for the Rabbinical Courts to formally convert them. Only a thousand a year ever get to the courts and this past year, in a dispute with the court, the Chief Rabbis revoked thousands of conversions because they felt that these converts were not observant enough to have a valid conversion.

7. To resolve this, MK Rotem, a member of Yisrael Beiteinu, the party that represents Russian Jews, introduced legislation late last year that would open more courts, so that the process of conversion would go faster and more Russians would have their Jewish status confirmed. The problem with the bill was that it put the final decision back into the hands of the Chief Rabbinate, the place where all this trouble started! In addition, it would mean that anyone converted outside of the State of Israel, would no longer be considered Jewish if they were to immigrate to Israel. This was a great change in the Law of Return and it basically was directed at the Conservative and Reform movements. It said to us that our conversions were not considered to be valid and our converts were not welcome in Israel.

8. Our movement protested this change as did the Jewish Agency in Israel as well as the Federations of North America. David Rotem came to the United States to talk with our leadership and to see if there could be a compromise on the issue. We made many recommendations but when Rotem returned to Israel, he reintroduced the bill without any changes at all! He not only did not hear our concerns, he clearly did not care about our feelings either. Only when we protested again, did Prime Minister Netenyahu pull the bill from consideration and assured American leaders as well as the Jewish Agency, that the bill would not be introduced again until there were serious negotiations and compromises that would address our needs.

9. This past week, out of the blue, Rotem again introduced this bill, this time with an amendment added by the Shas party that would make all conversions pass through the Rabbinical courts of the Chief Rabbinate and be subject to their “halachic observance” tests to confirm the validity of the conversion. Instead of helping the Russian immigrants who have been waiting so long, this would make their wait longer and much less fruitful. Rotem it seems does not think that there are enough non-orthodox Jews to really make a difference to him and to Israel. The real nasty part of this, though, is when the bill came up in committee, there were not enough Orthodox votes to pass the bill on to the Knesset floor. But Likud, the party of the Prime Minister, walked out of the room before the vote. This left the Orthodox with a majority and they voted and passed the bill with the tacit consent of Likud and apparently the Prime Minister as well.

10. Word went out and in an hour, 500 e-mails were sent to Prime Minister Netenyahu. Within 24 hours he had 8000 e-mails protesting the bill. Conservative and Reform Jews are not the only ones outraged by this bill. Natan Sharansky, the founder of the Yisrael Beiteinu party and the current chairman of the Jewish Agency demanded that it be removed from consideration. The Federations of North America is sending thousands of their own messages to Netenyahu demanding that the bill be killed. The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, the Jewish Week and many other newspapers have denounced this political move to appease the Orthodox parties at the expense of the unity of world Jewry. Our representatives have met with the leaders of other parties, like Labor and Kadima and have received much support and promises of action. We also met with the leadership of Yisrael Beiteinu but they don’t appear to care at all about our concerns and our anger.

11. Silent in all of this has been Prime Minister Netenyahu. Rabbi Steven Wernick, the Executive Director of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, our parent organization, wrote to us just two days ago, saying, “The primary focus of our efforts must be on Prime Minister Netenyahu. Because he is the leader of the government a clear and public statement by him in opposition to this bill is essential. His continuing to avoid a position amounts to tacit approval. Therefore all our efforts to contact him directly through key supporters and to email petitions and letters must continue through Wednesday evening.” Wednesday is the end of the current session of the Knesset. After that we will have time to do more to gather support to overcome this outrageous bill.

12. Rabbi Julie Schoenfield, the Executive Director of the Rabbinical Assembly wrote to Prime Minister Netenyahu and said, “Members of Knesset tell me this bill is too little too late. In Israel’s free and open society where extremists have given Jewish religion a bad image, many young Israelis don’t care whether a potential spouse is halakhically Jewish. The coercive ultra religious system is a total failure that spends tens of millions of NIS to yield only 1500 converts per year. Of those, 200 are Masorti, who receive no funding. The way to really “solve this problem,” is to have options for multiple streams and for the indigenous Israeli expressions that will only flower in a non-coercive system.” In other words, the conversion courts are an expensive waste of time and money for the State of Israel; what Israel really needs is a system that is open to the many streams of Judaism that exist all over the world.

13. In the long term, we have a lot of work to do within the political system in Israel. Rabbi Wernick noted, “Teaching Israeli leaders about Diaspora Jewry, and about Conservative Judaism in particular, must be a long-term goal. I am shocked by how little so many of them know about us.” It is one thing to want to serve the Israeli constituents who elected these leaders into the Knesset. But these leaders must not forget the rest of world Jewry, Jews who protect and defend the Jewish State from political enemies that exist in countries all over the world. Jewish Senators and Members of Congress have expressed to the Prime Minister their shock over this bill which could make support for Israel much harder in the US Congress if Israel should disenfranchise Israel’s supporters among non-orthodox Jews.

14. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post this week said, “ ‘Occupation’, Arab inequality, hateful infighting between secular and religious and even the gap between rich and poor in Israel have disenchanted many liberal Diaspora Jews, who feel that to blindly support Israel they must, as Peter Beinart recently put it, “check their liberalism at Zionism’s door.” Many are instead checking their Zionism. Now Rotem is offering another reason for Diaspora Jewry to feel estranged from the Jewish state.”

15. We all need to get involved in this affront to world Jewry and to Conservative/Masorti Judaism. What we are asking every Jews in America to do is to send an email to Prime Minister Netenyahu asking him to step in and kill this bill in the Knesset. If his party, Likud, does not support it, then it will be voted down. He appointed Natan Sharansky and the Jewish Agency to meet with Rotem and with world Jewish leadership to find a compromise on this bill. If it is to really help those who need it, these meetings should happen as soon as possible. The longer it waits, the more likely that Rotem will introduce the bill again, this time with even worse language.

16. If you are on the Temple Emeth email list, you should have gotten an email from us with a link to help you send a message to the Prime Minister. If you have email but are not on our list, go to our website, send your email address to our Administrator, Mariyln Mishkin and she will forward to you the link. It is important that you do this as soon as Shabbat is over. We need to let the Prime Minister know that there are hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world who are appalled by the Rotem conversion bill.

17. If you do not have email, or you do not have a computer, there is not enough time to send a letter. I suggest you go to the Library and ask to use the library computer and send your email from there. You can go to the Masorti website, http://www.Masorti.org and there is a link right at the top of their page. Click on the link and fill out the form so that your voice can join the thousands of others protesting this bill. There are cards in the Lobby with the web address of Masorti. If you don’t know how to do this, just ask the people at the Library to help you find the site and find the link.

18. This will be another disaster connected to Tisha B’Av if we don’t act to end this unnecessary bill that will cause a rift between American and Israeli Jews. The link between the United States and Israel must be strong and enduring. This bill will drive a wedge between Jews and make Israel’s political connections to the rest of the world dangerously frayed. Call your children and grandchildren. This is important. If we can flood the Prime Minister’s office with our protests, then this will be not a day of disaster but a new beginning as Israel will finally begin to understand the deep love we have for Israel that must not be neglected. All of our voices are needed. I ask you, on behalf of Jews all over the world, make your voice heard in Israel. Send your Email. Tell others to stand up and email Prime Minister Netenyahu. This week does not have to be the time of weeping and disaster. It can be the beginning of the redemption, the birth-pangs of the Messiah

19. The future of Israel and the fate of Israel truly rests in our hands. Speak up and let Israel know who we are and where we stand. May God be with us and with Israel in these days of danger and uncertainty and may we find reason to rejoice at this normally sad time of year … as we say AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM

1. Shabbat Shalom

2. There was a time when vows were an important part of society – in the days long before DNA testing, security cameras and CSI. Sometimes, the only way a community could have some closure in a situation where there were no witnesses or when there was no other way to determine who was right in a dispute, the only course of action was to have one or both parties take a vow that they were telling the truth. These vows were enforced with penalties for taking such a vow when they were made knowing that the vow was a lie.

3. There is also another kind of vow. It is a promise that you make to yourself. It is a kind of New Year’s Resolution on steroids. We make all kinds of promises to ourselves, to lose weight, to save money, to move to a better home, to get a better job, to give more to charity. Most of the time we either forget that we made the promise or we forget how really hard it is to keep these kinds of promises. A vow raises the stakes. It is a formal declaration to God that we are serious about making changes in our life and if we don’t then God will have the right to send down a divine punishment for our being either too lazy or absent minded to keep what we promised.

4. In either case, there is this notion that our words should have power in our lives. What we say should be connected to what we do. A vow taken is a promise that must be fulfilled. Today this whole notion seems to be quaint and archaic. Words don’t mean anything anymore. We see politicians make promises that we know the moment they make them that they will never be fulfilled. We view a steady stream of advertising that promises to remove our wrinkles, make our clothing cleaner and our teeth whiter. We don’t believe any of that stuff but the promises keep coming. Now we have the internet where anyone can say the most outlandish things and there will not only be people who believe what is said, they will forward the lie to hundreds of their best friends. In our modern world, words can no longer be trusted. If you can’t get the promise in writing, then it is not a real promise.

5. Yet, there are still people whose word is their bond. There are men and women who don’t say much but when they do, everyone knows you can rely on them to do what they say. I don’t know if anyone here remembers Congressman Sam Rayburn, the representative from Texas to Congress who died in 1961. He had a reputation for following through on the promises he made. In fact, one day, a reporter noted that Rayburn never wrote down what he was promising the people in his district. The reporter asked the Congressman, “How do you remember all the things you promise people?” Rayburn replied, “If what you promise is the right thing to do, you don’t have to worry about forgetting them.”

6. There is one area, however, where vows still play an important role in society. Wedding vows still carry a great deal of weight and power in society. When a couple promise to love and care for each other, that vow is an open ended commitment for sexual fidelity and unconditional support. In just a few more weeks, my youngest son will exchange vows with a woman he met in high school. My son may be young and idealistic, but he and his fiance are going into this relationship with their eyes open and their feet on the ground. They know exactly why they want to do this and they have every intention to being true to their promise.

7. Our society seems to not care anymore about the vow of being married. Fiction, movies, and gossip magazines feed us a steady stream of steamy affairs, philandering and exotic flings. If a space alien were to read almost any work of fiction or news, he would come to the conclusion that most married couples are not faithful to their wedding vows. It used to be that we would at least punish the politicians who could not be faithful to their wives, but today, that does not seem to be an issue. Former presidential candidate John Edwards was not vilified by the press by his unfaithfulness, but because the wife he was cheating on was battling cancer and he was, to say the least, not very supportive in her time of need.

8. Our parsha teaches that our words have to mean something. Our words have power and that power is a special gift from God. Just as God spoke words and through the power of speech the world was created, so too our words have the power to make our world a better place. Words can bring peace between two feuding friends or two warring countries. Words can call attention to the beauty and majesty of our world. Words can overcome feelings of depression or despair and bring out feelings of affection and love. Words, expressed in prayer and meditation can help us to understand our importance in the universe that God created.

9. Rabban Gamliel, one of the great sages of the Talmud, had a servant, a wise man named Tavi. One day Rabban Gamliel sent Tavi into the market place and asked him to bring back the greatest delicacy he could find in the shuk. Tavi returned that evening with a tongue. He told his master, “A kind tongue is one of the sweetest things in all the world.” The next day, Rabban Gamliel sent Tavi back to the market to find the worst food he could imagine. Tavi returned that evening with a tongue. Rabban Gamliel said to Tavi, “I thought you said that a tongue was the best food in the shuk?” Tavi replied, “When a tongue is good, there is nothing better, but when a tongue is bad, there is nothing worse.”

10. The power of words does cut both ways. We can use our words to build up, or we can use our words to tear down. Words can make things clear, or they can make our lives more confused. Words can help us aspire to greatness, or cut us down and destroy all hope. For this reason Judaism is very concerned that words be used constructively; we must use our words in a responsible manner so that we are not the cause of harm to someone else. As parents we know that our words can inspire our children to achieve great things but if we are mean and cruel, the best we can hope for is that therapy, healing words, will help restore their self esteem.

11. What applies to parents also applies to every aspect of our lives. Are we respectful with our words when we address clerks in a store or when we order a meal at a restaurant? Sometimes we are judged not by the way we treat our friends but by the way we address strangers. There are some who think that if they don’t complain, yell and demand in a store, then they will not get the best price. Sometimes this is true, but remember also, that bullying a sales associate in a department store or the wait staff at a restaurant will only cause resentment and anger in the very people you need to help you with your purchases. I was once told that it is very important to speak in a nice tone with those who check in your baggage at the airport. It is not unknown for travelers who give the counter staff a hard time to discover that their luggage has been diverted to a destination far from where they want it to be. I don’t know if it true or not but I can say that it always pays to be nice.

12. Finally, what applies to strangers applies even more to those that we love. Not being true to wedding vows is always a quick way to end a marriage. But speaking to our spouse either in anger or in a degrading manner probably is even more destructive to a good relationship. Nobody likes to be badgered or shamed in public. And yet, refraining from harsh speech in a marriage is not enough, we need to also add words of affection, tenderness and love. I know a story of a woman who complained to her husband that he never told her “I love you”. He looked up from his newspaper and replied, “I told you I loved you when we got married, if it changes, I will let you know.” This clearly is a man that needs to invest more words in his relationship.

13. The law of this country tells us that if something is important, if there is money involved, or if services are required, it is best to write it down and sign a contract. Contracts should be read carefully and if there are passages that are not understood, then we should get them clarified before we commit ourselves by signing our names. It is advisable to consult an attorney before signing any contract for anything important. We should not rely on words when the stakes are very high.

14. But if we decide to live our lives where our word is our bond, no matter if it is for our benefit or for something that could hurt us financially or personally, then we will raise our lives to a higher standard and we will find that our friends and neighbors will have the greatest respect for us. I recently spoke to a family after the death of their father. The son, who worked many years in his father’s business, said with a great deal of pride, “I never saw my father treat a customer or a vender harshly. He was always honest and fair.” There are few words we could add to a eulogy more honorable than these.

15. The Rabbis of the Talmud did not like vows. In every age, Rabbis advised Jews to be honest in all their words so that taking a vow would not be necessary. The Sages advised us to make a commitment and stick with it, without swearing in the name of God. We should not need a vow to remain committed to our words, we should be careful about what we say and about what we promise and always follow through on our word.

16. If we can make our words stand for something in the rest of our life, then our words of prayer on Shabbat will mean even more. If we use our words to make the world a better place, then our words of prayer will help us lift our lives and our hearts to even greater heights. Our siddur constantly reminds us that God promised Abraham that God would redeem Abraham’s descendants from slavery and bring them to the land God promised the patriarch. As God fulfilled God’s promise to us and to our ancestors, so too we should be sure to fulfill all the words that we speak, in the marketplace and in our synagogue. Let us use our words to make our world a kinder, honest and better world. A world in which our words bring us honor and bring honor to God as we say,

AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM

SHABBAT SHALOM

 In this week’s parsha, Pinchas, who zealously killed to defend God’s honor, is not to be prosecuted for his act of murder. While Moses and the other leaders where wringing their hands wondering what they were going to do, Pinchas put an end to the idolatry, killed the couple who had flagrantly brought sexual immorality into the precincts of the Mishkan and ended the plague that had threatened the entire People of Israel.

 The Rabbis are quick to note that without the intervention of God, Pinchas would have been guilty of capital murder. Orderly society cannot have zealots running around killing people in their religious fervor. In the Haftara that is read for today when it is NOT the first of the three weeks, Elijah the prophet has the same problem. He was zealous for God and had killed 400 priests of the idol Baal. Queen Jezebel, who worshipped Baal, was not happy and ordered Elijah to be executed. Elijah fled and after some adventures, ended up on Mt Sinai, angry that he had been zealous for God and now everyone wanted to kill him. He too wants the “brit shalom” the same exemption that Pinchas received for his zealotry.

When I was a little boy, our Rabbi had a hard time explaining to our class what Pinchas had done wrong. It was not the pagan sexuality that made my Rabbi uncomfortable; it was trying to explain why Pinchas was not a hero. In the face of all that was happening, only Pinchas took matters into his own hands. Like all the heroes in the movies, Pinchas didn’t wait for permission to do what he did. We children could see him holding his javelin as the two offending people entered the Mishkan and saying to them like Clint Eastwood, “Go ahead, Make my day!”

Today, we live in a world where these kinds of fundamentalist zealots carry bombs and seek to perform acts of mass destruction. Islamic zealots have been known to cut off the hands of thieves, kill women suspected of dishonoring their families and engage in wanton acts of destruction against other infidels and heretics to the faith. Christianity is also full of zealots, who shoot abortion providers to save the lives of unborn children. They defy the law that keeps the Ten Commandments off of the walls of our courtrooms, and those that keep religion out of our public schools. They even protest science textbooks that teach evolution over the Bible’s account of the creation of the world.

These threats from Christian and Muslim zealots, in my opinion, do not pose anywhere near the danger to Judaism as Jewish zealots. I have watched in horror over the last year as Israel has been rocked by scandal after scandal by those who would call themselves the most righteous Jews in the world. Over the years I have spoken out against their version of Judaism that has no place for anyone who is less religious than their community. I have been accused of Orthodox bashing, of not being fair to those who have a more observant lifestyle then I do. Who am I, they ask, to questions the motives of these super observant Jews/ what harm results from their zealotry?

This past year there has been much harm caused by these, self proclaimed “Haredi” Jews. Their actions now threaten the very existence of the State of Israel. Each day brings another outrageous action that undermines Israel’s government and pushes aside basic democratic principles. These Jews have come a long way from throwing stones at those who would drive in their neighborhood on Shabbat. Now they are willing to travel all over Israel, and all over the United States as well, to demand from everyone else, compliance with the way they view the world.

I have more examples of this than I can use in one sermon. Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of computer chips has a major manufacturing plant in Israel. They have been the foundation of Israel’s computer industry for many years. The Haredim, however, did not like the fact that the plant was open on Shabbat. They massed in the parking lot of the plant and tried to break inside to force the plant to close for Shabbat. They dared the government of Israel to try and stop them.

The city of Jerusalem, to solve its traffic problems, opened a parking lot in the city. The Haredim shut down traffic and the lot for weeks because they thought it should not be open on Shabbat. They created an ugly riot beating up peaceful protesters at Jerusalem’s first Gay Pride parade. They have entered Reform and Masorti congregations in Jerusalem and tried to “kidnap” the Torah scrolls so that women and non-observant men would not handle them. There have been Reform and Conservative synagogues that have been firebombed. So far, the police have no suspects.

In Beersheva, a woman was standing at a bus stop when a Haredi man started staring at her. Pushing himself into her face, he demanded to know what the marks on her arms were from. She backed away, saying it was none of his business, but he kept getting in her face demanding to know what the marks were from. Finally she said they were from the tephillin that she wore for prayer that morning. Spiting obscenities, he began to beat the young woman who was only saved because the bus finally arrived. To this day nobody has been arrested for the assault.

Women praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, standing in the women’s section near the stones of the Kotel, put on tallitot and men from the other side of the mechitza began to throw chairs at them. They created such a riot that the police had to remove the women for their own protection.

There are tens of thousands of Russian immigrants to Judaism in Israel who are not Jewish enough for these Haredi leaders. For ten years now they have blocked these Russian Jews from affirming their Judaism and from converting to Judaism to remove whatever question there may be about their past. In the Soviet Union, they were Jewish enough to be persecuted and arrested, but in Israel, they are persecuted because they are not Jewish enough.

In this country, these self proclaimed guardians of the faith have taken control of the Young Israel congregations. They are threatening a synagogue in Syracuse, NY with closing the shul, taking their Torahs and taking control of the congregational assets because they dared to elect a woman to be president of the synagogue. The national leadership of Young Israel, in disregard for Jewish law that permits women some role in Jewish life, will now no longer allow women to serve as president, they can not hold services for women only and they cannot read from the megilla. The Talmud may permit this but these zealots say it is forbidden.

In Hewlett, NY, in the Five Towns area, an orthodox congregation invited, as guest speaker, Sarah Hurwits, a Graduate of Avi Weiss’s seminary in Riverdale, NY and the first orthodox holder of the title “Rabbah” (instead of Rabbi). A Haredi Rabbi wrote in the local secular newspaper that this speech was a disgrace to Judaism and to “real” Torah scholars and that the Jewish community would have something new to cry about this Tisha B’Av. The Rabbi of the congregation that invited Rabbah Hurwits, noted that in a time when Israel was being assaulted physically and politically, this was completely out of line. We cry on Tisha B’Av because sinat hinam, baseless hatred between Jews, brought about the destruction of the Temple, and now we see that same hatred will destroy us again.

This week, there were riots again in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Haredi parents wanted to segregate their children from Sephardic Jews who are not as observant as the Asheknazic Jews. The Israel Supreme Court ruled that this kind of discrimination and segregation is not permitted. The parents then took their children out of school lest they be “corrupted” by the Sephardic children. The Supreme Court ordered the children to go back to school. The parents refused and the court ordered the parents to be arrested. Riots broke out to prevent the arrests. The Haredi called the Israeli police stormtroopers and Nazis for obeying the court and the Haredi claimed that they did not follow Israeli law, but only the Law of God and Torah.

My all time Hutzpa Award goes to the Haredim of Spring Valley, NY who took money from the state of New York to provide affordable public transportation for those who lived in Spring Valley who needed to commute to jobs in New York City. These buses were provided to the town using taxpayer money. The town, run by Satmer Hasidim, then ruled that women could only sit in the back of the bus. The women took the city to court and the courts ruled that public buses could not have segregated seating, not for anyone. The latest headline from just last May said, “Hasidim fear a gentile company could take over the line and might run routes on Saturdays, fail to separate men and women riders, and stop giving discounts to yeshiva students. Can you imagine that? A bus line that takes government funds should be run for the sake of all those who use the bus, and not just the Haredi?

What was the reward of Pinchas for his zealotry? Moses and God make him and his children priests for all time. They don’t get to remain zealots, they have to become part of the establishment and learn to live by the rules. What is Elijah’s reward for his zealotry? Elijah, to the end can’t understand what is wrong with being a zealot, so God forces Elijah into retirement and the duty of ending idolatry is left to his successor, Elisha.

The Haredi claim that it was an act of zealotry for Baruch Goldstein to kill unarmed Muslims in prayer at the Cave of Machpayla. They claim it was an act of zealotry when Amir murdered Yizchak Rabin in Tel Aviv. Until these zealots understand that if they can not be a part of the rule of law and order, then they will suffer arrest and marginalization in the Jewish world. Israel needs to stop coddling these Jews, to stop slapping them on the wrist and letting them go home, to stop treating them like children who are just being children, and insist that they be held responsible for their actions. Their Rabbis must be arrested when they incite violence and those who riot should be held accountable for the damage they do. Until there is equal justice for the zealot and the non zealot, these outrageous acts will only get worse.

Israel does not need this kind of distraction when our very existence is in danger. But with the steady stream of Israelis leaving the state because of Haredim complicating their lives and the refusal of Americans to make Aliyah to Israel because the Haredim want proof that they are Jewish, this kind of zealotry will undermine all that we have hoped a Jewish State would be. It is time, once and for all, for all Jews to denounce this kind of zealotry, and for Israel to insist that they obey the rule of law.

May God protect us all, not only from religious harassment by gentiles, but may God protect us from religious harassment by Jewish zealots as well. May we soon know not only peace for Israel, but peace in Israel as well. As we say…. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Shalom

In our parsha this week we see the effects of good propaganda. 12 spies go into the Promised Land and all 12 see the same sights, the good land, the rich soil, the strong cities and the local population. And yet they come back with different stories. To ten of the spies, the land is unconquerable, the cities are too strong, the people too powerful. Only two of the spies report that although things looked bad, Israel could still defeat them.

That night, the ten spies go through the Israelite camp spreading their point of view about the inhabitants of the promised land. They were giants and in their eyes we were mere grasshoppers that would be easy to crush. The invasion would be a disaster and there is no way we can win this fight. By morning, the people had heard enough; they gathered together and demanded that they be allowed to go to back to Egypt.

We can ask: how could two groups of people who see the same things have such different interpretations of the event? I see this effect almost every Shabbat. At the kiddush after the service someone always asks me how I can possibly feel one way about something when I said nothing about it at all. People hear what they want to hear. People see what they want to see.

I read the many different accounts of the confrontation between Israel and the boats trying to break the Gaza blockade. I read many articles in Ha’aretz, the Israeli newspaper, and I checked out what MSNBC, the BBC and the New York Times had to say. I usually figure that if I read enough accounts of what happened I might be able to identify what is propaganda and put together a reasonable idea of what really happened. I certainly came across a lot of misinformation and stuff that was clearly inaccurate and biased.

After much reading and reflecting, I came to the conclusion that the whole event was becoming a rather sad case of “He hit me first”. The initial accounts did not make a case really for either side. You can see people with clubs beating Israeli soldiers yet the “eyewitnesses” interviewed by the BBC said that there were only two and a half “wooden batons” on the main ship where the fight broke out. I counted a lot more than two and a half batons. The first Israeli soldiers on board were met with stiff resistance. The eyewitnesses claim that Israel shot first, before the passengers had to defend themselves but Israel contends it was only shooting plastic bullets and stun guns and that only when their soldiers were in danger did they pull out the pistols with real ammunition. The only thing we can know for sure is that there was chaos on the deck, and as a result a lot of people were injured and nine were killed.

It also seems to me that peaceful people do not swing bats at soldiers who are carrying guns. I know that today it seems to be the big thing in protests to taunt the police or legal authorities to provoke them into a fight. We have seen anarchists burn cars, break windows and push police officers to dare and stop them. This does not seem to be much different. Only this time the soldiers feared for their lives. Seven soldiers were injured and two have serious injuries that include stab wounds. It was this fear that brought about the order to start shooting, and it seems that nine of the people on board have died.

If there is anything else to this story, it will have to come out in an inquiry into the event. I am hoping that Israel will gather together some international observers and together examine those who were present that night. It would be good to see what kind of report they might produce. I know that many of these reports have been one sided against Israel which is why I think Israel should create the inquiry and then invite the others to attend. If it is done in an open and honest way, it could make a difference.

The things that bother me about this event are the way almost all the media outlets have covered the story. There is a blockade around Gaza. It is there for a reason. I have yet to see any commentator note why there is a blockade at all. Israelis themselves are a bit mixed about why they need to blockade Gaza, with some Israeli journalist treating it like the embargo on Cuba, a lot of noise but not really doing anything of substance. In case you don’t remember, the blockade was started after Hamas drove the PLO from power in Gaza and then refused to make any deals with Israel. As the rockets flew, Israel, and then Egypt closed the borders and allowed only humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. After a woman was caught trying to get a medical pass so she could go and blow up an Israeli hospital, the sick are no longer routinely given passage out of Gaza.

After Gilad Shalit was captured, it has been the policy of Israel to link lifting the blockade to his safe return home. I have not seen this mentioned at all. I should note that Shalit is being held without any rights or the ability to use the Red Cross to contact his family. The Red Cross quickly visited the prison where the members of the flotilla are being held, and there were visits by the ambassadors of the countries where the detainees are citizens. This is another example of how knowing the right questions can help us understand the news better.

It should also be noted, and one can see this if you read carefully, there were seven boats in the flotilla on the way to Gaza. All seven were told to stop. One boat did stop and was not boarded. Five of the boats, the smaller ones, were boarded apparently without incident. And a British passenger on one of those boats called the Israelis professional and not abusive, verbally or otherwise. All of the fighting and all the casualties were on the large Turkish vessel. These boats were towed to Ashdod where 50 people asked to be sent home and they went home. 680 others, who would not cooperate with Israel, have been arrested and were deported this week to Jordan or put on planes to their country of origin.

Those of us who support Israel have long been conditioned to believe that the only thing that matters to the Palestinians is military force. Every time they shoot at us, we have to shoot back. Every time they fire a rocket, we have to retaliate. If we fail to respond to any attack our enemy will see this as a weakness and will cause them to attack even harder next time. It is a sad fact that violence breeds more violence. But it can only work if we let them hit us first.

The problem for Israel is that they often think that any incident requires a military response. To a certain extent, the terrorists have forced us to do what really is not in our own best interest. Israel has to fight when fighting may not be the best course of action. As a result, it seems that Israel is constantly reacting with a very heavy hand to any provocation. In recent years it seems that Israel has constantly turned to war when a measured response might be more effective. This is not the first time that Israel has killed unarmed protesters. Certainly Israel does not desire civilian casualties. There just has to be a better way.

I know that there are some who disagree with me, but killing all the Palestinians, moving them to some other country or beating them into submission is not a long term answer. The cycle of violence realistically can only be changed diplomatically. That means Israel will have to talk with her enemies. Those talks have had some progress when it comes to the PLO and the West Bank. Hamas, on the other hand, refuses to talk. Hamas is an organization of fanatics who are prepared to die for their cause. To remove them from power will take a lot of finesse. We can see from the case of Iran that removing fanatics is not an easy proposition. I believe that there will come a day when the Palestinians will resort to non-violent confrontation, and when they do, Israel must have other options besides military options.

I am sure that Turkey and Israel will get back on track eventually. There are a lot of reasons for having good relations between these two countries. Turkey knows that many of those on the ship were associated with terrorism, a problem that Turkey has had for almost a century. Even with an Islamic party in power, Turkey too is fighting insurgency and terror in the country and in the cities. I have noted that nobody is talking about the identity of those who have died. It interests me to know if the dead were members of the fanatic groups in Turkey. It is hard for me to imagine that the hard core humanitarians on board took up clubs and knives to beat Israeli soldiers.

So where does this leave us? What are we supposed to do as Israel gets, once again, held accountable in a way that no other country is held accountable? First of all we need to speak up about why there is a blockade and what Israel is trying to accomplish. Second we need to point out that Israel is not opposed to humanitarian aide, and in fact provides such aide and that all the aide captured from the flotilla will be forwarded to Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu this week, said that anyone who has humanitarian aide to send to Gaza is welcome to send it, as long as Israel can check it to see that weapons are not being smuggled inside the shipments. Israel offered to forward this aide to Gaza even before the flotilla was stopped and the people on the flotilla refused to let Israel deliver it on their behalf. Israeli soldiers are not monsters. Israel is trying to do the best it can in difficult circumstances.

Any death in this war is a terrible death. Any death in any war is a tragedy. It should only remind us that we need to find a way to bring Israel and the Palestinians together, to end the constant state of war and to work together to end the terror of Iran and her agents in Hamas and Hezbollah. We need an agreement similar to the one that ended the terror in Northern Ireland. We need to insist that any organization that wants a place at the negotiating table with Israel needs to renounce violence and grant political recognition to all the other parties at the table. If Protestants and Catholics can do it, then the Jews and Muslims can do it too. The sooner we find a way to end this war, the sooner these tragic deaths will end.

Boycotts, Blockade running and Propaganda will no longer be necessary when both sides make the decision to make peace. Getting both sides to the table should remain our top priority and we should not rest until Israel is able to live in peace with all her neighbors. It is already too late for these most recent deaths. It is already too late for the hundreds of victims of terror in Israel. Every day should bring us closer to the day when those in Israel can sleep in peace. May God send that blessing soon.

Amen and Shabbat Shalom