RH2 5780 - Main Sermon
Shanah Tovah.Can I tell you something frustrating about this morning’s sermon? Not the specifics of what I’m planning on saying to you, but just some of the challenges that come automatically, when you deliver a sermon on the second day of Rosh Hashanah? No matter what I talk about with you all, here today, some people will automatically view it as a second-tier issue. Last year, I spoke about Israel, and when someone questioned me about it, I said, “but I devoted an entire sermon, one of my four MAIN talks on the High Holidays, to Israel!” and their response was, “sure, but you ‘buried it’ on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.”
For the record, I put all my sermons on my blog after the holiday (which you've clearly discovered, dear online reader...), so even people who weren’t here COULD read them, but again, no matter what I focus on for Day Two, or how I talk about it, it’s seen as getting short-shrift. So, what am I trying to “bury” and barely talk about with you today?
Well, if you were here for services yesterday, you may know that my theme for this year is “Jewish and…” thinking about various ways that our identities are multi-faceted. We can, and need to, maintain multiple priorities at once, and strive for a harmonious balance among all these various sides of ourselves.
I don’t talk a lot about voting or politics. I push enough buttons already, and - this year in particular - I am trying to choose my areas of engagement very, very carefully. One thing, however, that I continue to maintain vociferously, is that we cannot be one-issue-voters. Life doesn’t work that way. Yes, the world is confusing and overwhelming, and sometimes we are tempted to say, “I just want to focus on issue x, and whoever says what I want to hear on that topic, s/he will get my vote!” But it’s a dangerous oversimplification, and one that can easily be exploited by someone with ill-intent. No, my point of emphasizing “Jewish and…” is more than just talking about Jewish identity. I want to raise up how all of us - all people - are nuanced, complex, opinionated, passionate, diverse, and multi-layered.
So for today, for sermon #2 (you know, the throwaway one…), I want to expand even the scope of my topic: We, our community, Ohev Shalom, as a whole; we are “Jewish and.” We are Jewish AND… not-Jewish. And I mean this in a couple of distinct, but equally crucial ways. If we think of this as my Interfaith Sermon, there are two different paths we could walk down, and indeed we need to stroll along both of them. Interfaith can refer to the relationship WITHIN a family, where (at minimum) one person is Jewish AND one person is something else. And Interfaith is also the term we most often use for relationships between our congregation and the other houses of worship in our region. Our local gathering of religious leaders is, in fact, called the Interfaith Council of Southern Delaware County. Interfaith means both things, which in and of itself is quite interesting.
On the one hand, we might have thought (or still think) that there should be two different terms for these areas of connection. After all, one is intimately connected to a specific family, an internal dynamic within a unit, and how we, as a community, integrate family units with more than one history, tradition, culture, food, terminology, and even theology into our shared community. And the other is about our congregation as a single entity, affiliated and engaged with the local area communities, joining together on social projects, services, awareness campaigns, vigils, and to stand united when needed. So they can seem like QUITE different definitions of “Interfaith.” Yet on the other hand, both topics force us to engage with an important question, namely, “who do I include as ‘us,’ and who is left out as ‘them’?”
In the course of my work with FUSE, our Fellowship of Urban-Suburban Engagement, which has now been in existence for nearly six years, I have thought about this question a lot. Early on, the leadership team of FUSE discussed a subheading for our name, something like “expanding the fences.” And we received pushback. “Shouldn’t we be eliminating fences??” people would say. “All borders and boundaries are bad! There should be no ‘us’ and ‘them,’ that kind of talk is inherently discriminatory!” I wonder about that though. In a very impressive volume, written in 2011, entitled “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” Dr. Yuval Noah Harari tackles this question of us/them. He writes: “No social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species, no snail will lift a tentacle for the global snail community, no lion alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all lions, and at the entrance of no beehive can one find the slogan: ‘worker bees of the world - unite!’”
Harari goes on to say that globalism is a human invention, or rather an invention of homo sapiens. And even when our ancestors tried to remove barriers and create common causes, according to Dr. Harari, “somewhere in the next valley, or beyond the mountain range, one could still [always] sense ‘them.’” So rather than try to eradicate this notion that has existed for millennia upon millennia, perhaps our time would be better spent reflecting on how we treat the people who are considered ‘us,’ AND the people who are considered ‘them.’ Yesterday, the main point I tried to make in my sermon was that “to be in relationship, we need to make space for ‘And.’” Today, the question is, ‘in relationship with whom?’
At least for me personally, our community definitely includes “Jewish AND not-Jewish.” We are interfaith in BOTH senses of the word. Let’s look a bit more closely at each one: Our expanded community of FUSE - made possible by the Netzach Grant established here in our congregation - as well as our partnerships through the incredible work of our Social Action committee, our USY teens, our families engaged in Mitzvah Projects, and the collaborative work we’ve been doing through the Outreach Grant; all of these create a greater sense of ‘us.’ This is indeed relationship-building, so it takes a lot of time and effort. This includes awkward moments, misunderstandings, clashes in food culture, some disagreements, and a GENEROUS helping of patience… but what many of us are discovering is that it starts to shift from an engagement across a vast divide - ‘us,’ over here, dealing with ‘them,’ over there - and gradually morphs into a new definition of who WE are. We 'fuse' together into the “US” in the middle of our name...
In his recent book on Jewish community-building, entitled “Next Generation Judaism,” my colleague, Rabbi Mike Uram, who heads the Hillel program at UPenn, writes about the importance of changing your mindset. “When we speak differently, we think differently, and when we think differently, we act differently.” It can be incredibly powerful - AND empowering - to change our vocabulary to one where our FUSE network and our Outreach partners, all the people we live with here in Delaware County, and who share our desire to thrive and succeed, be safe and healthy, and to nurture our families and our communities; ALL are one, united “us.” THAT is my goal.
Just last month, our FUSE group received some very exciting recognition. The Religious Leaders Council of Greater Philadelphia - which represents more than 30 member communities and (according to their website) more than 2 million people in the Greater Philadelphia region - awarded FUSE a distinction known as Zones of Peace. We were actually nominated by Shari Baron, so I want to extend a shoutout to her for her pride in our FUSE work and her desire to magnify FUSEs voice and reach. In their presentation ceremony in early September, John Hougen of the Religious Leaders Council talked about how FUSE is “creating relationships and fostering cooperation among people who are often isolated by mistrust, fear, and bigotry” and he praised FUSE for its “effective work in addressing the root causes of violence and building a better community.”
Building a better - and SHARED - community is indeed our goal. The hard work, however, is by no means concluded! The Zones of Peace award will hopefully be a great motivator for future progress. It can be used, say, in a High Holiday sermon (albeit on the second day of Rosh Hashanah…), to energize new participants to join FUSE. But more always needs to be done.
The same is true for our interfaith inclusion within Ohev Shalom. It can so easily just remain a talking point, or a hot topic to put on our new ShulCloud app (shameless plug!), to demonstrate that we are relevant and modern. But we also NEED to continuously challenge ourselves to walk the walk of our convictions; or as Rabbi Uram stated, “speak differently, to think differently, to act differently.”
So many studies tell us that interfaith families either do NOT feel welcomed, especially into Conservative synagogues. Or even if they ARE greeted warmly, they are continuously treated as newcomers, assumed to be outsiders looking in. Especially if it’s a multi-racial or multi-ethnic family. I don’t have an easy answer here; it is an open question put to our entire community… all of the “US” present right now, or reading this sermon online: How do we change ‘them’ into ‘us’? How do we begin to live, openly, fully, and proudly, with a community that is Jewish AND not-Jewish?
Another colleague of mine, Rabbi Michael Knopf, at Temple Beth-El in Richmond, VA, has been a leading voice in pushing the Conservative Movement to be more inclusive of interfaith families. He led his congregation, last year, to the bold and unprecedented resolution of permitting their synagogue’s clergy to officiate at interfaith ceremonies... IF and WHEN the movement allows it. In other words, they are breaking NO prohibitions at the moment… but publicly putting pressure on the leadership of the movement, by signaling that they would be supportive of the change, and ready to begin making the shift a reality… and ideally sooner rather than later!
Rabbi Knopf has written eloquently about this issue himself, specifically taking on the infamous surveys of American Jewish Life, that many of us know and have had brandished in our faces, stating that interfaith families are less likely to affiliate, even lesser-likelier to raise Jewish children, and almost impossibly ever going to produce Jewish grandchildren. Challenging this common trope, Rabbi Knopf writes, “As intermarriage has shifted in our time from crisis to simple fact of contemporary Jewish life, many have come to realize that intermarriage is not a threat to Jewish continuity, but rather an opportunity for Jewish flourishing and vitality.”
But more than just stating an opinion, he goes on to say: “When Jewish organizations and institutions reach out to and include intermarried families in Jewish life, they become as likely as in-married families to remain Jewishly attached... Conversely, when the Jewish community adopts an exclusionary posture toward intermarried families, we miss an opportunity to strengthen the Jewish partner’s connection to his/her tradition… and to bring the partner from a different background into deeper and more meaningful relationships with Jewish tradition and community.”
In other words, intermarriage is simply a reality of the Jewish and American landscape in 2020. It does not help us to label it as good or bad; it just is. But where we have agency, where we - as a community - CAN affect change, is how we define ‘us’ and ‘them.’ When we turn people away, they will indeed feel rejected, and will not affiliate with the Jewish community. Big surprise! But what if we expand our fences? Folks, we’re already doing it, but our language hasn’t always caught up. We don’t mean to, but sometimes we state our interfaith inclusion hesitantly or sheepishly. If we change how we speak, it may shift how we think, and in turn transform how we act.
You already know that we are more than just one thing. I think even though I’m only on sermon two out of four (and on the consolation-prize one, no less…), most people already agree, generally speaking, with the notion of “Jewish and.” I believe we can all appreciate that there are multiple parts to our identity, both individually and collectively. But is there room for “Jewish AND not-Jewish”? Yes, we care about relationships, but we also need to keep asking ourselves, ‘in relationship with whom?’
As we gaze ahead into our future, we cannot help but wonder who we will be, and who will be the ‘us’ that keeps this place going. We believe in Relational Judaism, and we know that we are also relational Sapiens, who WOULD lift a paw or a tentacle for others of our species, and who DO want worker bees everywhere, metaphorical AND actual, to be protected. This is our space, our home, our Zone of Peace. Let ‘us’ continue to FUSE together with others who share our community, and let’s expand our fences together. And yes, even though I spoke about this on the infamous Second Day of Rosh Hashanah, I care about this topic a lot.
Shanah Tovah!
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