Yom Kippur 5777: Morning Sermon

Here is my fourth, and final, High Holiday sermon on the topic of "Kavod," honor and respect. Please continue to share feedback, whether here on the blog or with me directly (via e-mail, phone, or in person); it is all greatly appreciated. I wish you all a Shanah Tovah - Happy and Healthy New Year!

Yom Kippur Morning 5777, D’var Torah

Shanah Tovah!

Did you see what the rabbis did just there? It was subtle, sure, but it’s so significant that we really cannot let it go unacknowledged. You see, our ancestors were VERY sneaky. They wanted to get their message across, but they didn’t always want to just knock you over the head with it, they wanted to be savvier than that, a little more cunning. Here’s what I’m talking about. Our Torah reading this morning came from the Book of Leviticus. It outlined the rituals of Yom Kippur in the Ancient Temple, so of course it was used as the subject of our Yom Kippur morning Torah reading. Lev. 16:31: “It shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for you, and you shall practice self-denial.” That, by the way, is the verse you can thank for why you are starving right about now; thanks a lot for the fasting, Leviticus! The text goes on to elaborate on the very detailed and intricate rituals of the High Priest, and concludes with this thundering line: “It shall be to you a law for ALL TIME; to make penitence for the Israelites for all their sins once a year.” (34) It is unequivocal, folks. These are the statutes of Yom Kippur for ALL TIME! We MUST follow them to the letter of the law.
And then, the very next thing the rabbis have us read, after we learned all those Yom Kippur rules, comes from the Prophet Isaiah, chapters 57 & 58. Isaiah scolds us: “Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like reeds bending in the wind, and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when Adonai is favorable? No! This is the fast I desire; to unlock the shackles of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off EVERY yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe them, and do not ignore your own flesh and blood.”
Let me be really, really clear about this: Isaiah’s message is the exact OPPOSITE of the one we read RIGHT BEFORE in Leviticus. As we sit here, hungry from fasting, feeling sacred and holy for all our praying, the rabbis hold up a mirror to our faces and say, “Do you really think that is what God wants? IF there are people out there hungry, sick, oppressed, crying; do you think there are enough Avinu Malkeinu’s or Kol Nidrei’s or chest-beating Ashamnu’s to make that ok? No. Not a chance.”
This is probably a good moment for me to share with you my agenda here today. Although I can also be a little sneaky… In 1902, an American writer, Finley Peter Dunne coined a term describing the role of newspapers in our country, but I have heard many people use it to describe perfectly the work of the ancient prophets: “They comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” When things were bad, the prophets foretold salvation and redemption… but when people grew apathetic, lazy, and complacent, the prophets railed against them to do better,
to BE better. Many rabbis throughout the last two millennia saw themselves as the keepers of the prophetic legacy, and I think that is what you see going on in our Machzor. On the holiest day of the year, with the most people present, when we might be feeling safe and secure… and comfortable, the rabbis hold up a mirror to OUR faces, and remind us we are not doing enough. The world, and indeed our very own community around us, needs us to do more. Like our ancient prophets, and our medieval rabbis, I too want to employ that same mirror. So… are you feeling afflicted yet?
This is my fourth and final sermon on the topic of Kavod, meaning honor and respect. We’ve spoken about honoring the self, honoring our congregation, and honoring our different relationships with Israel. I would like to conclude the series by talking about “Kevod Ha-briyot,” honoring all people, which we might also describe as “Honoring The Other.” We’ve also thus far spoken about three of our patriarch, Jacob’s four wives. All these panels you see on the walls around us were descendants of Jacob, also known as Israel, but they each had a mother as well. Leah and Rachel we know quite well, but Zilpah, mother of Asher and Gad, is less known, as is Bilhah, mother of Dan and Naphtali, and the final matriarch about whom I’d like to speak.
Bilhah, in my mind, represents The Other. We know nothing about her.
Her story does not feel like ours, because none of us are descended from the tribes of Naphtali or Dan. They were two of the Ten Lost Tribes, part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE (so over 2,700 YEARS ago), and whose stories separated from ours at that moment. They are not us. We know next to nothing about their descendants, so we don’t have to care about what happened to them. Right? Well, there is an interesting little asterisk at the end of that narrative. The Jewish community of Ethiopia, known as the Beta Yisrael, traces its origins back to – indeed – the Tribe of Dan. They cite testimony from a man who appeared in Egypt in the 9th Century CE, named Eldad ha-Dani, who said he came from Ethiopia, and that the people of his kingdom were descendants of the lost tribe of Dan. Today, many Ethiopian Jews live in Israel – over 120,000, in fact – where they keep the traditions of the Beta Yisrael, and their story has once again fused back to ours. A lost tribe has come home.
But these stories are never simple. The Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel today faces a lot of racism and discrimination. In May of 2015, Israeli Ethiopians demonstrated in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv after a video was released of an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian descent being beaten up by Israeli police officers. Sound familiar at all? Black lives have a difficult time mattering there as well. Their story IS ours. That is Isaiah’s message. “Unlock the shackles of wickedness… do NOT ignore your own flesh and blood!”
There is an organization called Jews of all Hues, which reminds us that we are not all white, and that there IS a problem of racism within the Jewish community and in Israel. Furthermore, OUR community isn’t just the Jewish community, but Delaware County and our neighbors RIGHT HERE as well. I know you’ve heard me talk about our community project FUSE before, and I need to speak about it again, and I will do so in the future as well. It is part of my prophetic mission. I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say! But EVERY time I talk about FUSE, every time I do any work with FUSE, I feel energized, uplifted, and excited. I can’t help it. It feels like the work I NEED to be doing; it feels like my prophetic call. What can I say?
FUSE stands for the Fellowship of Urban Suburban Engagement, and it is our way of saying THIS is our community. We are one. We need to speak with one another, form relationships with people in Chester, Media, Swarthmore, Marcus Hook, Wallingford, and across our county, and we NEED to learn and take to heart that our fates are intertwined. Our country cannot heal until we all work to heal one another. I am so honored and grateful that my partner in this work, Mr. Cory Long, is here with us today. Cory runs a mentoring program in Chester called Team MAC, Team “Making a Change.” Cory was born and raised in Chester; he is OF Chester, as he likes to say. He is a role model and a leader in the community… and Cory is my friend.
We debated back and forth about having him actually come up and share his story with you, because I don’t want to speak FOR him, but we decided – together – against it. For today… Nevertheless, it means SO much to me that you are here today, Cory. I want to say publicly how privileged I feel to work with you, how much Rebecca and I have enjoyed spending time with you and Ronette, and how much you have taught me in a short time. Thank you.
Cory and I, and many other community leaders, are working together for the honor, the Kavod, of our shared home. Bonnie Breit, Shari Baron, Joel Fein, and others within Ohev are joining this work as well, and if you don’t know much about FUSE yet, and want to, please let me know. We are holding a very important community conversation on Racism TOMORROW night, in fact, at Wallingford Presbyterian Church, and on November 20th, Ohev is hosting a big FUSE interfaith Thanksgiving concert, called 4Ever Grateful, which I hope you can all attend. Our congregation is filled with Leah’s and Rachel’s, people whose lives we know, and whose stories feel like our own. But we also need to make room for the Zilpah’s and the Bilhah’s, who may seem strange and foreign, but who are a part of US nonetheless. Can their honor become as dear to us as our own?
Unintentionally, I seem to have been carrying yet another theme with me throughout the High Holidays this year. I really hadn’t meant to, but I’ve been quoting Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in nearly every sermon.
Half a century ago, many people saw him as embodying that same prophetic voice, and he actually had a good friend whom HE saw as being a modern-day prophet as well. In March of 1968, Heschel was introducing his friend, as he got up to speak in front of a group of rabbis. Heschel said: “Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America.” Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel were indeed good friends. They famously marched together in Selma, and just a few weeks after Heschel introduced King to those rabbis, he heart-breakingly found himself reading a psalm at Dr. King’s funeral. Three days after that funeral service, had he not been assassinated, Dr. King would have been celebrating Passover at the home of Heschel and his family.
Both Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel embodied the prophetic voice of old. They certainly afflicted the comfortable; they knew how to challenge the status quo and FORCE people to think about the need for change… But they also comforted the afflicted. One of the things I especially find SO powerful about each of them is how they REFUSED to lose hope. Ever. The point of my challenging you all today is not to cause guilt or shame. That doesn’t work on anyone. You know that I know that. But we also can’t be apathetic. We can’t become desensitized, and we can’t stop fighting for change. I KNOW how it sounds when I tell you this feels like my prophetic call.
I hear myself say it and I’m surprised… and a little embarrassed. Who am I to claim such a thing?? In Hebrew or Yiddish, we might say it takes an awful lot of Chutzpah to compare myself to the prophets, or to people like Heschel and King. In English, we might say it is filled with audacity and hubris.
But chutzpah, audacity, is actually a powerful part of Yom Kippur as well. We dress in white, because we imagine the angels too wear, or are by their very nature, white. We fast, in part because angels don’t need food. And there are lines in our liturgy, our prayers, that every other day of the year we say only silently, because only angels spoke them out loud. But on Yom Kippur, we shout them aloud, so that perhaps God will believe we are free of sin and pure like the heavenly angels. What chutzpah?!?! Could we EVER successfully FOOL God??? What tremendous and ridiculous audacity!! Yet, here we are. And here I am, Hineini, telling you we need to hear this prophetic call, and we need to do better in the year ahead.
While we’re on the subject of chutzpah, of audacity, it also makes me think of President Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope,” in which he too echoes the same sentiments we’ve just heard from Isaiah, Dr. King, and Rabbi Heschel. Obama writes, “To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen... to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want, while looking squarely at America as it is,
to acknowledge the sins of the past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.” This is my question for all of us here today, and for the year ahead: Can we, together, maintain that split-screen? Can we talk about systemic racism, gun violence, white privilege, white fragility, and the problems that plague our society, yet all the while refusing to become bitter, jaded, or so cynical that nothing changes or we stop caring? Can we come to the table and speak honestly, holding up mirrors to one another, and challenging each other to be our best selves, to form new relationships and bonds across our various divides, to heal our country and our world together?
This entire past year, along with focusing on the work that Cory and I have been doing with FUSE, I’ve also been struggling with something that Martin Luther King said. Or rather, I’ve been stuck in a split-screen. One part of the screen focuses on Dr. King’s famous line, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He reminded us to be patient, because the universe IS good, maybe it’s just Good Enough, and slowly but surely we’re getting there. Things ARE getting better. But the other part of my split-screen is a retort, a provocative response from the writer, Ta-nehisi Coates, who recently stated in his book “Between the World and Me”: “The arc of history bends towards chaos.” Things aren’t getting better, or when they do, they snap back in the other direction as well. Xenophobia, racism, bigotry, fear and all its mongers;
Coates is very concerned that the universe moves in the OPPOSITE direction to what Dr. King suggested. I can’t stop thinking about these two quotes, these two world-views, or perhaps universal-views. But we are not passive in this story. We are movers; we bend, and we need to decide which way we will curve; like reeds in the wind, or like angels, shouting out glory before God.
As I conclude this sermon, and with it my theme for these High Holidays, I again want to emphasize my message: I am NOT peddling guilt or shame, but I AM trying to push you, and maybe afflict you JUST a little. You know, Ohev Shalom is about to celebrate its centennial. One hundred years ago, our story began in Chester, much like Cory’s, and much like many of you, sitting here today. Like Cory, we are “OF Chester.” Our history is fused together; our future should be too. The panels on these walls should remind us that we as Jews are not just descended from Leah’s son, Judah, or Rachel’s sons, Joseph and Benjamin, but Zilpah’s children as well, and Bilhah’s too; our shared story takes many forms… and many different hues.
We need to remember this at all times, and place before ourselves the prophetic call of “Kevod Ha-Briyot,” honoring ALL people. We need to share our bread, our clothing, and even our homes with one another, and never allow ourselves to believe that nothing will change. We can make change happen, if we do it fused together.
But we have to keep our eyes on the split-screen, aware of the problems that afflict us and comforted knowing we WILL get to a better place. There IS a lot of chaos swirling around us, and making things seem bleak and hopeless. But we need to hold on to our chutzpah, our audacity. We cannot allow ourselves to be crushed by the chaos. It may push us, it may even bend us. And we SHOULD bend. But when we do, let us bend towards honor and glory; let us bend towards Kavod.
Shanah Tovah!