1. Shabbat Shalom
2. When Jacob stretched out his hand to bless his grandchildren, Ephraim and Menashe, he blessed them saying, “In them may my name be recalled, and the names of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, and may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth.” (Gen. 48:16) Jacob is saying that through these two young men, the names of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will be remembered forever.
3. The founder of Chabad Hasidim, the very first Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Lyady, makes this great observation on Jacob's blessing. Shneur Zalman says; “May God bless them as long as they call themselves by traditional biblical names. The most valuable legacy we can leave our children and grandchildren is bequeathing to them the faith that sustained us.” I don't quote the Lubavitcher Rebbe very often but I thought that this was a remarkable insight. If our children and grandchildren will remain true to our faith, then they will find that the faith that sustains us, will sustain them as well.
4. So let me cut right to the chase here. There are Rabbis today, who don't seem to understand that they should pass on to our children the faith of our ancestors; they instead preach and practice a faith that, instead of sustaining our children, will be a faith that will destroy them. I am not referring to Reform or Reconstructionist rabbis, not even to the New Age rabbis who don't seem to connect their faith to much of anything traditional. I turn my attention today to the Ultra-Orthodox rabbis, both here and in Israel, who speak of a faith of fear rather than a faith of hope and who teach bigotry rather than peace. To these extremist rabbis on the far Right, no Jew is good enough. Jews have to be weighted down with every conceivable law to prevent them from going astray.
5. When I first went to college, and began my studies of history, I found historians who noted that the reason the Pilgrims and Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had so many laws that regulated their life was because they feared every moment was an opportunity to go astray. That is the way things are in any religion that seeks to control its members. But it is impossible to create a law for every possible action. We human beings are way too complex to be able to restrict in every fashion. Eventually there is rebellion and the pendulum swings back, away from the extreme, and back to the center.
6. For the past 30 years, from the time I first started Rabbinical School, I understood right away that the trend in Orthodoxy to shift to the Right would be a dead end street for them. I like to apply what I call “the Gunfighter Rule” to their understanding of Jewish Law. A gunfighter in the old west always knew that someday, he would meet another gunfighter who was quicker on the draw than he was. Probably it would be the last person he met. The problem with the Orthodox shift to the Right was that no matter how strict a person could be with Jewish Law in their life, it was inevitable that someday they would find someone else who was stricter than they were.
7. First you had to be Kosher. Then you had to be Glatt Kosher. Now even Glatt is not enough, and there are, in Israel, stricter rules for meat; and even the OU is not good enough for them anymore. Food not only needs to be supervised, but it needs to be supervised by someone who is stringent enough or else, even if he has been supervising for 80 years, his word is no longer good enough. It is not enough that there is a certificate of Kashrut in the window, it has to be the RIGHT certificate or it means nothing.
8. But if we are just arguing about food, then we just have a difference of opinion. However when it comes to personal status issues, then it involves people's lives. Until about 50 years ago, it was assumed that a Yeshiva student would spend many years in school, even after he was married, but eventually, he would go into business and earn a living to support his family and provide for his retirement. Today, it is expected that the student will remain a student all of his life and his wife, or the parents, will provide him with money to allow him to study full time. If they cannot do this, in Israel this means that they will be subsidized by the State for their studies and live off the taxes of others.
9. Such students don't serve in the Israeli Army. There are Yeshivot, called “Hesder” Yeshivot, where study is combined with military service. But to these Ultra-Orthodox Jews, such students who serve the State of Israel are not the kind of Jews they would allow their daughters to marry. There are also soldiers who serve in the Israeli Army and convert to Judaism as a result of their service to Israel. The rabbis of the Israel Defense Forces do these conversions all the time. The ultra-Orthodox rabbis refuse to accept their conversions. This week, in the Knesset, a bill passed its first reading that would force the Ultra-Orthodox rabbis to accept these conversions. Shas is now threatening to break out of the coalition. Israel Beiteinu, the party of Russian Jews, who are the ones most likely to be converted in the IDF, insists that they must be accepted.
10. And then, there were, among the Ultra-Orthodox rabbis, a petition, signed by 300 rabbis who are paid by the Chief Rabbanut as municipal rabbis for the different cities and communities in Israel, a petition that declared that it is forbidden to rent an apartment in Israel to a non-Jew. Anyone who rents his or her apartment to a non-Jew would be told that it is forbidden and if they rent it anyway, they would be shunned and refused permission to daven or have an aliyah in shul. I should add that this ruling is against the law in the United States and in Israel. Such a blatant form of bigotry is forbidden by the declaration of independence in Israel and now the Attorney General of Israel is considering charges against these municipal rabbis. Thousands of rabbis all over the world have decried this ruling. But the Ultra-Orthodox rabbis don't care because they are their own law. They don't follow Israeli law. They only follow God's Law, as they interpret it.
11. This is what happens in every case where religious authorities are given political power. Such power eventually brought down the Hasmonean family, the descendants of the Maccabees, who became so corrupt that the Romans eventually came and took over the country from them. It was this kind of political power that brought down the Pope because of the Mortata affair, when he refused to release a child back to a Jewish family after the boy had been kidnapped and converted. Political power among Muslims has led some very wealthy countries to remain, for all purposes, stuck in a medieval mentality, unable to function in the modern world. These two issues in Israel, may finally lead to the end of the Chief Rabbanut in Israel, a governmental body that is so routinely ignored that Israelis don't pay any attention to their Judaism at all anymore.
12. Religion is a path for each of us to find peace in our lives and peace in living with each other. It is not a contest to see which denomination is the best. Our only task is to see how well we live by the tenets of our faith. Just because someone is stricter in his or her observance, does not make them a better person. A mentch is someone, no matter how meticulous they may be in their observance, is kind, caring and considerate. I would love to see more Jews eat kosher. I would love to see more Jews observe Shabbat and come to pray three times a day. I would love it if every Jew took the time to have a Seder, build a Sukkah and study Torah for at least a few hours every day. But I would prefer that all Jews be mentchen. An observant Jew who is a bigot, racist or prejudiced performs a Hillul HaShem, he desecrates the Name of God. A Jew who cares more about what goes into his mouth than what comes out of his mouth, does a Hillul HaShem, he desecrates God's name.
13. I started this with a quote from Shneur Zalman, the first Lubavitcher rebbe. I have lots of issues with Chabad, but this is not one of them. They are dedicated to living in the real world. I am not an Orthodox Jew but I understand their position in Judaism and while I don't share their stand, I know that every Jew has to find the way to God that works for them. If Orthodox Judaism works in their life, then that is fine. But when Ultra-Orthodox Jews define themselves as the only true Jews and all the rest of us are sinners, and not worthy of their time and attention, when they claim that their path is the only correct path, when they use political power to force everyone into compliance, they are not significantly different from the religious Right in this country who are constantly trying to write their religious positions into the law for everyone.
14. There must be a full separation of church and state, in this country, and full separation of synagogue and state in Israel. This will not damage the Jewish nature of Israel, in fact, it will strengthen it. When Israelis are finally able to practice Judaism in a way that meets their own spiritual needs, they will turn to Judaism as a place to find peace in their hearts, peace in their communities and peace in their corner of the world.
15. I don't know if land for peace will really bring peace or not. I don't know if Israel has a real partner for peace in the region or not. I don't know what it will take to have secure borders under a two state solution. That is for the politicians to decide. For Jews, we should be preparing for that day, when we will live in peace with our enemies and thus pave the way for the Messianic age. That is the Judaism that I know. That is the Judaism I preach and that is the Judaism that I live every day of my life. I pray that our children attach themselves to this kind of Judaism, the Judaism of our ancestors, and not the kind of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism that brings dishonor to the memories of our Patriarchs.
A faith that would make us bigots and tyrants is no faith for me. I pray that we give up political power to free us so we may live by God's law in a way that will bring love to our homes, peace to our communities and will bring God into our hearts. May this be our constant prayer.
AMEN AND SHABBAT SHALOM
Monday, December 20, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Miketz
1. Shabbat Shalom
2. There are times when a Rabbi has to really dig deep into Rabbinic Literature to find a topic to speak about for Shabbat. Sometimes we have to look for obscure commentators or arcane literature to find a topic that would interest the congregation. This is not one of those weeks. It is not only Shabbat, it is also Hanukah; it is the holiday season and we are rapidly approaching the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is even the obscure date of December 5th that will occur this weekend, one of the few solar dates, a date not connected to the Jewish lunar calendar, that changes the wording of our liturgy. There is no shortage of topics that we can talk about this morning.
3. Last week, in our Parsha, we saw Joseph who had dreams of glory, fall, not just into a pit, but sold into slavery. We saw him rise again in the house of Potiphar, only to fall again into prison after being falsely accused. This week we see him rise again to be the second most powerful man in Egypt, but we see him also fall in the way he treats his brothers when they come to Egypt looking for food. That is the story of Joseph, it is a roller coaster ride of success and failure, but he keeps picking himself up, learning from his mistakes and slowly growing into the greatest of the Patriarchs.
4. This week we saw, in the news, the fall of those who are in power. The name “Wikileaks” will never again be confused with water dripping or some internet shopping site. After publishing the secret documents that showed the world the kind of war we were fighting in Iraq, this week the internet site released over a quarter of a million secret diplomatic documents that revealed the workings of our State Department and the Embassies that do our diplomatic work around the world. There were no documents that were categorized as Top Secret or Highly Classified. Virtually all of the documents were simply privileged or not for publication. They were the diplomatic correspondence between the Embassies and the State Department assessing the situation in foreign countries around the world and the sources of the information that was being shared. It had private opinions of diplomats and ambassadors and some very sensitive ideas that were the thinking behind the foreign policy decisions of our government.
5. Some of the documents endangered important sources that our Government relies upon to get sensitive information. To their credit, the New York Times and other newspapers carefully edited out those documents that would endanger lives. They made a distinction between the papers that placed sources in peril from those that were simply embarrassing to the author. Newspapers print embarrassing documents all the time. But they didn't want to jeopardize the lives of the sources and they also understood that nobody would ever become a confidential source to our diplomatic corps ever again if their words would not be anonymous. But even with this “editing” of the papers, the publishing of these papers rocked diplomatic circles around the world.
6. Many foreign rulers were discovered to have private feelings quite different from their public pronouncements. It turns out that Israel has many allies in its “existential” fear of Iran. Many other Arab states quietly agree that Iran is a very dangerous state and they encouraged the United States to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. It seemed almost comical to me that diplomats, who are trained to choose their words carefully as they negotiate agreements between governments, in private are not only candid but almost reckless with their opinions. I am sure that there were many ambassadors who had to call their counterparts in other governments to apologize, to explain and to try and mitigate the embarrassment and damage from the release of these private papers. It seems as if one low level office worker in Army Intelligence was the source of these leaks and he will face court-marital and jail. There is also many looking for the head of Wikileaks to bring him to trial for publishing the documents that were marked as secret. He has disappeared. There was also an attack over the internet on the computers that Wikileaks uses, in an attempt to prevent them from publishing anything at all.
7. So what is the Jewish angle to this sudden opening of the curtain behind the diplomatic dance that we see every day? Some of my colleagues see this as an example of Genivat Daat, the stealing of ideas and thoughts. They may be right. This may be the real sin behind the release of these documents. But I see a different lesson here.
8. A student once asked his Rabbi, “What Jewish lesson can we learn from a telephone?” The Rabbi thought and replied, “What is said here, is heard there.” We have this idea in our heads that words that we say in private, will remain private forever. I just hope that nobody in this room, with all the life experience that is represented here, still thinks that “What is said here, stays here.” The motto of Las Vegas may be “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” but it is just not true. If someone is important enough and does something stupid in Vegas, you can be sure there will be someone to sell the words and pictures to the press.
9. A teacher once told me that I should only speak sweet words, in case I should have to eat them later. This is really good advice. There is a difference between candor and being offensive. There was no doubt that President Nixon was a tough politician. But when we heard all the swearing on the White House Tapes, it did not make us any more proud of our President. Presidential candidate Gary Hart thought that his private liaisons with a woman other than his wife would never become known to the public, and when they did, he gave up any chance he had of being elected again. Colonel Oliver North, testified before Congress that his conversations with the Nicaraguan Contras and the illegal sale of arms to Afghanistan rebels, had been carefully deleted from the National Intelligence computers. What he didn't know that, for security reasons, there was a backup of all conversations on a different computer. And it all came out at his trial and almost brought down President Reagan.
10. The most embarrassing papers in the Wikileaks release are those that were basically unnecessary. Diplomats said things that should have never been said. They gave voice to opinions that should have never been voiced. They made a record of their thoughts thinking that they would never become known. But they did and now they have to eat their words. Judaism teaches us to watch our words. To say what we mean and not speak words that are hurtful or mean. We must speak with candor and not be afraid to tell the powerful that they are wrong and need to change their ways. But there is no excuse for words that hurt another person or words that tear them down. Our inner words should be the same as our published words. Just as our inner thoughts should be the same as our outer actions. What is said here, is heard there. If not by the one we hurt, by the God who hears all that we have to say.
11. What we see in these diplomatic papers is what amounts to Global Gossip; people who should know better writing things that should never be written. They thought that their words were read and then destroyed, but they were not destroyed and now they have destroyed reputations, friendships and feelings.
12. I am quite sure, that our State Department will officially apologize for the embarrassing letters and they will be forgiven because, in the Foreign Affairs department in every country of the world, they probably use similar language in their own diplomatic cables thinking that their words will never become public. Even in totalitarian regimes, the truth will eventually come out. We can save ourselves embarrassment and shame if we just watch the words we speak and print.
13. Rabbi Yani once heard a street vender hawking “the elixir of life.” When the Rabbi inquired as to what this elixir was, he was given this verse from Psalms, “Who is the man that desires life and desires many days that he may enjoy good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” And Rabbi Yani replied with a verse from Proverbs, “He who keeps his mouth and tongue, keeps himself out of trouble.” The Rabbis declare that words are like an arrow, that once they are shot into the air, there is no way to retrieve them. The Mussar literature also teaches, “The tongue is your slave as long as you keep quiet. After you have spoken, you are its slave”.
14. This week there are many important people in the world, including our Secretary of State who wish they could call back the words that were leaked to the press. The thoughts shared may be true, but the words were written carelessly and hurtfully. If we wish to avoid their mistake, we need to follow the advice of Psalms, “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.”
May God help us to watch our words, those spoken and those in print, and may we speak sweetly at all times, lest we one day have to eat what we have spoken.
Amen and Shabbat Shalom
2. There are times when a Rabbi has to really dig deep into Rabbinic Literature to find a topic to speak about for Shabbat. Sometimes we have to look for obscure commentators or arcane literature to find a topic that would interest the congregation. This is not one of those weeks. It is not only Shabbat, it is also Hanukah; it is the holiday season and we are rapidly approaching the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is even the obscure date of December 5th that will occur this weekend, one of the few solar dates, a date not connected to the Jewish lunar calendar, that changes the wording of our liturgy. There is no shortage of topics that we can talk about this morning.
3. Last week, in our Parsha, we saw Joseph who had dreams of glory, fall, not just into a pit, but sold into slavery. We saw him rise again in the house of Potiphar, only to fall again into prison after being falsely accused. This week we see him rise again to be the second most powerful man in Egypt, but we see him also fall in the way he treats his brothers when they come to Egypt looking for food. That is the story of Joseph, it is a roller coaster ride of success and failure, but he keeps picking himself up, learning from his mistakes and slowly growing into the greatest of the Patriarchs.
4. This week we saw, in the news, the fall of those who are in power. The name “Wikileaks” will never again be confused with water dripping or some internet shopping site. After publishing the secret documents that showed the world the kind of war we were fighting in Iraq, this week the internet site released over a quarter of a million secret diplomatic documents that revealed the workings of our State Department and the Embassies that do our diplomatic work around the world. There were no documents that were categorized as Top Secret or Highly Classified. Virtually all of the documents were simply privileged or not for publication. They were the diplomatic correspondence between the Embassies and the State Department assessing the situation in foreign countries around the world and the sources of the information that was being shared. It had private opinions of diplomats and ambassadors and some very sensitive ideas that were the thinking behind the foreign policy decisions of our government.
5. Some of the documents endangered important sources that our Government relies upon to get sensitive information. To their credit, the New York Times and other newspapers carefully edited out those documents that would endanger lives. They made a distinction between the papers that placed sources in peril from those that were simply embarrassing to the author. Newspapers print embarrassing documents all the time. But they didn't want to jeopardize the lives of the sources and they also understood that nobody would ever become a confidential source to our diplomatic corps ever again if their words would not be anonymous. But even with this “editing” of the papers, the publishing of these papers rocked diplomatic circles around the world.
6. Many foreign rulers were discovered to have private feelings quite different from their public pronouncements. It turns out that Israel has many allies in its “existential” fear of Iran. Many other Arab states quietly agree that Iran is a very dangerous state and they encouraged the United States to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. It seemed almost comical to me that diplomats, who are trained to choose their words carefully as they negotiate agreements between governments, in private are not only candid but almost reckless with their opinions. I am sure that there were many ambassadors who had to call their counterparts in other governments to apologize, to explain and to try and mitigate the embarrassment and damage from the release of these private papers. It seems as if one low level office worker in Army Intelligence was the source of these leaks and he will face court-marital and jail. There is also many looking for the head of Wikileaks to bring him to trial for publishing the documents that were marked as secret. He has disappeared. There was also an attack over the internet on the computers that Wikileaks uses, in an attempt to prevent them from publishing anything at all.
7. So what is the Jewish angle to this sudden opening of the curtain behind the diplomatic dance that we see every day? Some of my colleagues see this as an example of Genivat Daat, the stealing of ideas and thoughts. They may be right. This may be the real sin behind the release of these documents. But I see a different lesson here.
8. A student once asked his Rabbi, “What Jewish lesson can we learn from a telephone?” The Rabbi thought and replied, “What is said here, is heard there.” We have this idea in our heads that words that we say in private, will remain private forever. I just hope that nobody in this room, with all the life experience that is represented here, still thinks that “What is said here, stays here.” The motto of Las Vegas may be “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” but it is just not true. If someone is important enough and does something stupid in Vegas, you can be sure there will be someone to sell the words and pictures to the press.
9. A teacher once told me that I should only speak sweet words, in case I should have to eat them later. This is really good advice. There is a difference between candor and being offensive. There was no doubt that President Nixon was a tough politician. But when we heard all the swearing on the White House Tapes, it did not make us any more proud of our President. Presidential candidate Gary Hart thought that his private liaisons with a woman other than his wife would never become known to the public, and when they did, he gave up any chance he had of being elected again. Colonel Oliver North, testified before Congress that his conversations with the Nicaraguan Contras and the illegal sale of arms to Afghanistan rebels, had been carefully deleted from the National Intelligence computers. What he didn't know that, for security reasons, there was a backup of all conversations on a different computer. And it all came out at his trial and almost brought down President Reagan.
10. The most embarrassing papers in the Wikileaks release are those that were basically unnecessary. Diplomats said things that should have never been said. They gave voice to opinions that should have never been voiced. They made a record of their thoughts thinking that they would never become known. But they did and now they have to eat their words. Judaism teaches us to watch our words. To say what we mean and not speak words that are hurtful or mean. We must speak with candor and not be afraid to tell the powerful that they are wrong and need to change their ways. But there is no excuse for words that hurt another person or words that tear them down. Our inner words should be the same as our published words. Just as our inner thoughts should be the same as our outer actions. What is said here, is heard there. If not by the one we hurt, by the God who hears all that we have to say.
11. What we see in these diplomatic papers is what amounts to Global Gossip; people who should know better writing things that should never be written. They thought that their words were read and then destroyed, but they were not destroyed and now they have destroyed reputations, friendships and feelings.
12. I am quite sure, that our State Department will officially apologize for the embarrassing letters and they will be forgiven because, in the Foreign Affairs department in every country of the world, they probably use similar language in their own diplomatic cables thinking that their words will never become public. Even in totalitarian regimes, the truth will eventually come out. We can save ourselves embarrassment and shame if we just watch the words we speak and print.
13. Rabbi Yani once heard a street vender hawking “the elixir of life.” When the Rabbi inquired as to what this elixir was, he was given this verse from Psalms, “Who is the man that desires life and desires many days that he may enjoy good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” And Rabbi Yani replied with a verse from Proverbs, “He who keeps his mouth and tongue, keeps himself out of trouble.” The Rabbis declare that words are like an arrow, that once they are shot into the air, there is no way to retrieve them. The Mussar literature also teaches, “The tongue is your slave as long as you keep quiet. After you have spoken, you are its slave”.
14. This week there are many important people in the world, including our Secretary of State who wish they could call back the words that were leaked to the press. The thoughts shared may be true, but the words were written carelessly and hurtfully. If we wish to avoid their mistake, we need to follow the advice of Psalms, “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.”
May God help us to watch our words, those spoken and those in print, and may we speak sweetly at all times, lest we one day have to eat what we have spoken.
Amen and Shabbat Shalom
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