I’d
like to begin today with an exciting announcement. Mark your calendars right now
because in just 2 1/2 months, Jews all over our country will, for the first
time in their lives, celebrate : Thanksgivukah
- the once every 18000 year confluence
of Thanksgiving and the first day of Chanukah.
United as Americans and Jews for this once in an eon opportunity, we
will of course dine on deep-fried turkey, but also latkes with cranberry sauce, and pumpkin sufganiot;
our menorahs will instead be called menurkeys[i], with red, orange and
yellow candles emerging from ceramic turkey-tail feather candle-holders – don’t
believe me? Check out Thanksgivukah’sFacebook page: as of yesterday, there were nearly 3000 likes and the number is
growing. There doesn’t seem to be a Jew (or
a retailer) that isn’t excited about Chanukah’s early appearance this year.
So,
why does Chanukah fall so early on the civil calendar this year? Well, unlike the Gregorian calendar’s solar
orientation, "the Jewish calendar is based on not 1, not 2, but 3 astronomical
phenomena: the rotation of the Earth around its axis (a day); the revolution of
the moon around the Earth (a month); and the revolution of the Earth around the
sun (a year)." The Jewish calendar actually connects them all, creating a cycle that
aligns and diverges, eventually realigning with the secular calendar. But the really amazing thing about the Jewish
calendar isn’t just the complicated algorithm that makes it work. It’s that the calendar itself is actually a
profound Jewish teaching: that nothing in the universe is isolated or
independent. Rather, everything is inextricably woven together in the
encircling spiral of existence.
This interdependence
stands in opposition to the forces controlling the orbit of secular society. Last
May, New York Times culture
commentator David Books wrote a really interesting article demonstrating just
how much so.[ii]
His piece described Google’s new database of 5.2 million books published
between the years 1500 and 2008. The
database includes a search function enabling anyone to type in a word and find
out how frequently or infrequently that word has been used throughout the ages.
Brooks’ article revealed two notable cultural phenomena of the last 50 or so
years. First: it showed an increase in modern society’s emphasis on the individual
over community. As it turns out, over the last half century, words and phrases like “self,” “unique,” and “I can do
it myself” were used more frequently than relational words like “community,”
“tribe,” and “common good.”[iii] But along with an increase in
individualization, came the second result: a decrease in the prioritizing of
morality. Terms like “virtue” “decency,”
and “conscience” were used less frequently.
Gratitude words like “thankfulness,” humility words like “modesty” and
compassion words like “kindness” decreased by nearly 50% while productivity
words like “result” and “deadline” skyrocketed.[iv] We live in a culture
intoxicated by the myth of radical individualism.
In his
flagship book “Bowling Alone[v],” Robert Putnam offered expansive data confirming America’s changing
behaviors: our disconnects from one another along with our disintegrating social
structures – such as religious organizations, political parties, and even bowling
leagues. We are literally bowling
alone. But you don’t need to be a culture commentator or social scientist to notice this.
When it’s commonplace that family out-to-dinner nights entail parents
and children sitting around a table together, but each staring at the screen of
a personal device; or when the first, and sometimes only question we ask in
response to a problem is “How does it impact me?” we know that somehow, knowingly
or not, we’ve prioritized the Sovereign Self over the community. The first
person singular “I” is the new world. After all, friends, there’s a reason Apple
doesn’t call them we-pods, we-phones, and we-pads.
I’m
not claiming any lack of culpability either.
And here’s the problem for all of us:
this notion that there is nothing more important than my independence
and my “self” is perhaps the biggest, most dangerous lie.
The
lie, however, is not a new one, and we’re not the first people to be drawn into
its pull. Let’s talk about Jonah - the
last biblical story we read on Yom Kippur.
When the story opens, God tells Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh that
if they don’t repent, God will destroy them.
Jonah, though, is not particularly interested in helping out
Nineveh. You see, Nineveh was an enemy
of the Jewish people at the time – think Iran, North Korea, or perhaps even
Syria for an appropriate contemporary equivalent. “Why should I help them repent? It would be better for me if God zaps them –
destroys them all. Why should I care
what happens to them?” Jonah thinks. So,
he runs away. He finds a boat, hops
on. You know this part. Big storm.
While everyone else on the boat is terrified that the boat will split
apart, Jonah sleeps soundly, oblivious to the world around him. The crew members decide to toss Jonah
overboard to appease God. Something that
proves quite a wakeup call, since Jonah almost immediately is swallowed by a giant
fish. For three days and three nights,
Jonah languishes inside the fish's belly. It’s enough time for him to learn his
lesson: Choose to shut your eyes, to believe that you are just one, isolated,
independent person, choose to believe that you are NOT a part of something
bigger, and that you don’t have to be accountable to the world, and here’s what
you get: Live alone. In darkness.
(Where it doesn’t smell so great either.) Away from the world of which
you claim you are not a part. Jonah
promises to change his behavior. The creature then spits Jonah out, and Jonah
delivers God’s message to Nineveh. They repent, and God forgives them. The story goes on, but you get the
point.
The
very last Biblical message we get on Yom Kippur wakes us up to the fact that
although everyone and everything may look like independent, disparate entities
floating around the universe at random, the spirit knows, the soul knows, (and
by the way so does science), that every last one of us is connected to everyone
else. We are just like giant redwood
trees, each seemingly a powerful, independent miracle of nature, but dig a
little deeper, and you will see that they all share the same root system, not
only intertwining and using each other’s roots to create a wide base enabling
them to grow to their abounding heights, but often in fact, fusing their roots
together, so that they cannot survive without each other. You will never see a towering red wood tree
standing solitary in a field. John Miur,
the environmentalist for whom the famous and beautiful Miur woods was named, illuminated
this deep Jewish truth when he famously said: “When you tug at a single thing
in the universe, you find it is attached to everything else.” 
I was
reminded of this lesson first hand this summer during my participation in a
rabbinic delegation with the American Jewish World Service. Inspired by the Jewish commitment to justice,
AJWS works to realize human rights and end poverty in the developing world.[vi] This summer, AJWS flew me and 16 other rabbis
from across the country and the denominational spectrum 7,643 miles around the
planet to Lucknow, a city in North Eastern India and the small rural village of
Bhakaripurwa. Each morning, our group would do construction work in the village
to help improve its school, its students’ water access, as well as provide a
sanitary food-preparation area. Each
afternoon, we met with AJWS grantees and social justice activists from across
India, and each evening we would study the Jewish sources rooting our engagement.
I had
so many incredible experiences while in India, and I look forward to sharing
more of the trip with you over the coming year.
But today, I want to share the story of just one person I met. Her name was Renu. For as long as she could remember, Renu was different
from the rest of her siblings. A daughter
in a traditional family from the highest caste, her role as a female was clear
and also notably limited. Her mother
died when she was a child, and her father died when she was only 19, and still
unmarried. Although women are not
permitted to perform funeral rights, she insisted on carrying her father to his
funeral pyre literally on her back, along with the other males in her
family. When her siblings tried to force
her into an arranged marriage, Renu refused. They disowned her. Left with
nothing, Renu swore to herself she would never marry or bring children into such
a cruel and unfair world. And then,
somehow, despite the terribly complicated and corrupt system, Renu continued
her education, eventually going to law school and becoming a lawyer. And along the way, she met and fell in love
with her now husband. When they had
children, Renu and her husband chose to make up an entirely new, non-caste-defining
last name for their children, so they would never be subject to the narrowness
and oppressive nature of the caste system. We would expect that the next part
of her story would be that because of her experiences of rejection and
oppression, Renu and her family then moved to London or to the US, where they
now live a life of freedom, worlds away from the pain of their former
community. But instead, her story goes
like this: because of her experiences of rejection and oppression, Renu, in
that very same oppressive community, founded and dedicates her life and work to
a legal advocacy group[vii] that addresses women’s
issues from within a human rights mandate, with particular attention to
violence against women and the right to choice in sexual relationships. Renu is
a person who, by rights, would be completely justified in separating herself
from her community and the system. But instead, she chooses to dedicate her
life to that very system, to its improvement, for the betterment not just of
women, but of everyone. And when people like you and me support AJWS, AJWS is
able to help fund organizations like Renu’s throughout the global south, so they
can change their communities from the ground up. You and I, AJWS, Renu, and communities a
world away, seemingly independent entities orbiting each in their own universe,
and yet, Judaism comes to say that all of it, just like the sun, the moon, and
the Earth, are in fact connected and interdependent.
About
my trip this summer, people often ask me, “Did you visit the Jewish community in
India? Or Synagogues there?” and I say “No.” And then they say, “So, it was a
service trip, but not a Jewish trip, right?” And I say, “No, it was a service
trip, but it was also a totally Jewish trip.” And then I get this puzzled look.
I
think that we Jews, living in the 21st century, have become confused
about what being Jewish and doing Jewish means in our world. Yes, being Jewish
means having a special relationship with the Jewish people, both here, and
everywhere else. It means understanding
that as Jews, we value each other, our communities and synagogues. It means we are responsible to and for each
other and our communal institutions. No
one else will do it for us. And by the
way, educating our children about their Jewish identity, nourishing our own
spiritual selves alongside others in community, supporting our synagogue and
this community that we call our spiritual home, these are not burdens; they are
privileges. Being Jewish also means that
we, as Jews, will always have a deep relationship with Israel. Whatever your opinion about land and peace
and religious practice, we, the Jewish people, don’t have the right to dust
away Israel from our hands. To deny any
of this is to deny a unique gift that is particular to the heart of what it
means to be Jewish. But being Jewish also comes with a unique demand to see
beyond our own sovereign selves and our own sovereign communities.
On
December 7, 1972, Apollo 17 captured a photograph of Earth as it traveled
toward the moon. It showed for the first
time a color view of the entire planet, with its swirling brown and green land
and cobalt seas and white clouds. The
magnificent blue marble whose circumference spans 24,901 miles filled the entire
frame, and in that one image, it expanded for all humanity our understanding of
the larger planet of which we are all a part.
Long before that photograph, our tradition taught us that our Jewish obligation extends as wide as our world. It is our particular identity as Jews that calls us to a responsibility to the other in the circles extending out from our center. To all of them. We can’t say it applies to one and not the other.
We’ve
heard a lot about this these High Holy Days. Rabbi Greene reminded us of our
connection to the fate of Judaism in the State of Israel. Rabbi Mason charged
us to consider gun violence and immigration issues. And he reminded us that even if we have no
perceived invested interest in Syria, we still aren’t permitted to look the
other way.
There
is an interesting teaching in the Talmud[viii], where someone asks
what the best way for a person to cultivate holiness is. One rabbi says to study Torah. Another says to make sure to say blessings
whenever you have a chance. The third,
and the winner, offers an odd response.
He says that to be holy, we must practice and uphold laws of civil torts
– the laws of damages. Why? Because guess what is at the heart of civil
litigation? One person in relation to
another. When you don’t uphold the laws
of damages, you negate the critical notion that each person is responsible for
and accountable to the other. The great 19th
century rabbi, Israel Salantar taught that we should see our responsibilities
in the world as follows: first a person
should put his house together, then his town, then the world – in expanding
circles of obligation that may begin at the center, the perceived point closest
to us, but those responsibilities do not end until the wide expanse of the
world is encircled in our embrace.
Jewish
tradition is clear that we are accountable to and responsible for the
communities from which we consume because we are, whether we recognize it or
not, in relationship with each other. We
live in a world about which we know more than we ever have before. Our market place is no longer the corner
shop. It is the globe. Don’t believe me? When you get home today,
take a look at the tags on the clothes in your closet. Some will say made in America. Some may even
say made in Israel. But still others will
say India, and Bangladesh, and China, and, so on.
This tallis I’m wearing today serves as a powerful reminder for me. I bought this fabric in India – fabric traditionally hand woven and painted by women in a rural village in Bengal, and sold to me through an organization that provides those women in that village education opportunities, job training, legal advocacy, and fair commission so that they can empower themselves and improve their own lives. I knew when I saw it that I would turn it into a tallis, so it could serve as a physical reminder to me, and perhaps now to you, of our unique obligation as Jews in bringing people from the outside in.[ix] Of knowing the heart of those we would call the stranger. Of our accountability to the world around us, in everything we do. Because our own sovereign self, and our own sovereign community, and our own sovereign world are all connected by the very same roots. “When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it is attached to everything else.”
Two
days before I left for India, NASA’s robotic probe, the Cassini Orbiter, while
travelling on the far side of Saturn, captured an incredible image of that
planet’s majestic rings along with a tiny pale blue dot - a planet called Earth nearly 900 million
miles away.[x] No surface features are visible since Earth
takes up only a scant few pixels – however its unique blueness, caused by
sunlight reflecting off our planet’s oceans, clearly shines through.
One of
the early Jewish mystics, Moses Cordovero, wrote of the theological impact that
this picture leaves, 500 years before it was taken. He said: “…If you are enlightened, you know
God’s Oneness; Then you wonder, astonished: “Who am I? I am a but a tiny speck* in the middle of the
sphere of the moon, which itself is a speck within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains
in relation to the next sphere. So it is
with all spheres – one inside the other – and all of them are a speck within
the further expanses.”[xi] From which we might expect Cordovero to
conclude that we are therefore nothing, that our lives are small and
insignificant and meaningless in the grandeur of the cosmos. But instead, he says this. “Your Awe is invigorated, the love in your
soul expands.”
The
sun, and the moon, and the Earth, and you and I, and so much more, are all part
of one infinite, eternally unfolding and interdependent cosmos, of which we are
nothing more than the tiniest speck of dust, but nothing less than the guarantors
of its harmonious grandeur. “When you
tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it is attached to everything
else.”
[i] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/830273895/the-menurkey
[ii] Brooks,
David. “What Our Words Tell Us.” New York Times. May 20, 2013
[iii]
Ibid.
[iv]
Ibid.
[v] Putnam,
Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse
and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2000.
[vi]
Www.ajws.org
[vii]
AALI – The Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives. http://aalilegal.org/
[viii]
Bava Kama 30a
[ix]
As informed by Exodus 23:9 in particular. See too Levinas’ teaching “The trauma
I experienced as a slave in the land of Egypt constitutes my humanity itself.
This immediately brings me closer to all the problems of the damned on the Earth,
of all those who are persecuted” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and
Lectures p. 142.
As well, BT Gitin 61a, Dt 21:1-9 and Mishnah Sotah 9:6.
Dt 22:8, as well as recent halachic responsa around Pikuach Nefesh that expand
the limits of “lifanecha” in “choleh lifanecha.”
[x] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cassini-probe-captures-view-of-Earth-from-saturn
[xi]
As translated by Danny Matt – note my choice to change Matt’s translation
“mustard seed” to “tiny speck” given the readers’ lack of awareness of the
context/connotative value of “mustard seed” in biblical/theological
hermeneutics.
