Month: July 2020

A Reform Jewish Perspective on Tisha B’Av

~ slfuchs ~ Leave a comment

Today, the Ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, Tisha B’Av, is a day when traditional Jews fast in memory of the magnificent Temples of Jerusalem which were each destroyed, the first by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second by the Romans in 70 CE. The day also is a solemn one in memory of other historical tragedies associated with that date. For example, it is said that the beginning of the first Crusade in 1095, a time of persecution and slaughter of the Jews of Europe and in 1290 the expulsion of Jews from England both took place on that date. Tisha B’Av also coincides with the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

The meaning of this day of tragedies does not rank high in the consciousness of most Reform Jews, and that raises the question of what might we make of Tisha B’Av today

The destruction of the two Temples and the exile of Jews from our sacred land that followed, were occasions of death and suffering, and sorrow is appropriate. Certainly all the other historical tragedies associated with that date are important to remember too.

On the other hand, the centrality of the Temple in Jewish life ended abruptly with its final destruction, and there is no merit in reviving its traditions anew. Much of the Temple’s centrality revolved around its role as a place for animal sacrifice as a sign of repentance, thanksgiving or celebration. After the destruction and dispersion, though, the Jewish people found other ways worship built them around their synagogues and homes. Rabbis rose up from the community instead of priests and much of this has served us well as we wandered through the world. I know of no non-Orthodox Jews who wish to see a reconstructed Temple, a reinstitution of animal sacrifice, and a return of control over Jewish life to a hereditary priestly class.

While a tragedy of the time, the destruction of the Temple liberated Judaism to become what we treasure today, a religion based on the study of Torah, of prayer and of acts of kindness and compassion: a religion and a way of life that reaches deeply into everything we do.

The very vibrancy and strength of the Jewish people over the centuries attests to the wisdom on what we have become and not what we once were. It may sound odd, but in that sense Tisha B’Av, can be seen as both an occasion of hope and optimism as well as one of remembrance and sorrow.

It is left to us to reconcile the remembrance of genuine tragedy with the possibilities for the growth and development of the Judaism that has been passed down to us. In that context I observe a fast on Tisha B’Av until mid day. During that time I study the traditional text for the day, the biblical book of Lamentations.

At one O’clock I break my fast with a mid day meal grateful for the Judaism that has been bequeathed to us over the years, a Judaism that no longer slaughters animals and sprinkles their blood as a sign of gratitude or as a petition to God. I celebrate the fact that a Judaism without the Temple and its hereditary priestly class has been replaced by a Judaism we can all access and immerse ourselves in while we absorb the lessons our people gleaned over the centuries of wandering and before our return: that each of us should use our individual talents in our own way to make the world a better place.

Tisha B’Av for me is also the day when I begin preparing for the period of introspection culminating in the rituals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Impetus for beginning the process of repentance comes from the middle of the book of Lamentations.

“Let us search and examine our ways and return to he Eternal One!” (Lamentations 3:40)

This year, with the Covid-19 pandemic ravaging our world as we know it, Tisha B’ Av seems more real to me than ever in my lifetime. We are suffering from fear, from isolation. We cannot celebrate our joys, and we cannot mourn our sorrows with those we love.

But just as the horrific destruction of the temple allowed Jewish life to emerge int a future with new and better ways to relate to God and to each other, so too will this pandemic pass. When it does I pray we emerge into a future with greater appreciation of our many blessings and a greater consciousness of our role as stewards of god’s creation that impulses to redouble our efforts to protect our fragile environment.

For Reform and Progressive Jews, then, Tisha B’Av can be both a day of mourning and a day of joy. We mourn for the destruction of the temple, but we rejoice that we have developed a strong, resilient means of surviving as Jews.

Mourning the tragedies of the past and the present we begin our annual process of intense self-examination. May we have the courage and the strength to search and examine our ways, strive to make our actions consistent with the will of the Almighty, and face the future with hope and courage!

My Tipping Now Begins at 40%

~ slfuchs ~ 4 Comments

fullsizeoutput_2c82

My treasured Wes Yamaka graphic that has challenged me from my study wall since 1974.

Since local restaurants began to reopen for outdoor seating a few weeks ago, my tipping rate now begins at 40% with a twenty-dollar minimum.

There are three reasons I have adopted this practice:

  1. Server incomes have suffered greatly during the pandemic
  2. I don’t eat out very often
  3. I can afford it.

What I really would love to do is buy large pieces of prime real estate in cities throughout the country. On these parcels I would erect lovely apartment buildings, and rent the units to low income or homeless people on a sliding scale that they can afford.  If nothing is what they can afford, they get their apartment rent-free.

I would also like to start and stock a food bank that delivers food free of charge to all who our in need.  No more waiting for hours in line for a bag of groceries.  Each day trucks would deliver the food—good, nutritious and healthy food—to the homes of clients who wait for their parcels in air-conditioned comfort.

I would also love to build, staff, finance and open a massive medical research clinic with top rate doctors and scientists working diligently on two fronts. One division would be operating twenty-four hours a day in three shifts producing Covid-19 tests that the clinic would administer free of charge to any and all who requested them.  The second division would be hard at work developing a vaccine that will eliminate Covid-19 as decisively as the Salk and Sabin vaccines virtually eliminated polio. When we succeed, we shall administer those tests and vaccines at no cost.

While I am at it, I would love to operate a massive, nation-wide diversity and sensitivity training program for police officers that would insure every cop on the street knows, appreciates and responds appropriately to the very real fear so many in our country feel when an officer detains them for walking, driving or hanging out while Black.

Unfortunately, I have no plans to build apartments, establish my food bank, open my clinic or institute my dream of massive retraining of police officers because I cannot afford to do any of these things. But I can tip 40% or more.

When I was formally installed as the rabbi of my first congregation, Temple Isaiah in Columbia, Maryland—now relocated in a lovely building in Fulton, Maryland – in 1974, the congregation commissioned a well-known local artist, Wes Yamaka, to create a piece for me to include any quotation. I chose without hesitation (and slightly revised) the immortal words of the Second century Sage Rabbi Tarfon: “The day is short; the work is great … and the Master of the House is urgent.  It is not incumbent upon us to complete the task, but neither are we free to desist from it.”  (Pirke Avot 2:15-16)

That quotation looked down on me from my congregational studies in Maryland, Nashville, Connecticut, and in my office when I served as President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in Jerusalem. Now it challenges me here in Sanibel.

Just because we cannot do everything we would like to do, we should not cease to do the things we can do to make a more just, caring and compassionate society on this planet God has entrusted to our care.

I can’t build homes, a food bank, or a clinic. I cannot provide vital training for every police officer in America. But I can respond to the pressure and hardship the pandemic has created for those who serve Vickie and me when we venture out for a meal. And so we start our tip at 40% with a twenty-dollar minimum. I add more if the service is exceptional.

None of us can do everything we would like to do, but all of us can do something. If our gesture brightens someone’s day, I am grateful.

 

 

 

We Still Have Much Work to Do

~ slfuchs ~ 4 Comments

Torah Thought: Shelach Lecha June 19, 2020

I am beginning to feel like the rabbi who came to a new congregation and delivered his first sermon.  The congregation waited with eager anticipation for his initial Shabbat message, and the rabbi did not disappoint. He electrified them with his eloquence, knowledge, and oratorical style.  The congregation was ecstatic.

The following week a hush came over the congregation as the new rabbi stepped to the podium to deliver his second sermon. To the congregation’s shock, he repeated verbatim his message of the previous week. The officers huddled in the back of the sanctuary after the service and decided: “Lets’ not say anything. Perhaps he was nervous or confused.”

Wen the rabbi delivered the exact same message—word for word—a third time, though, the Board of Trustees convened an emergency meeting and confronted their new rabbi: “We don’t understand, the president said. “You inspired and moved us with your brilliant sermon three weeks ago, but then in the following weeks you simply repeated what you said before. Why?”

“That’s easy,” the rabbi responded. “When you all do as I instructed you in the first sermon, I will be happy to give you another.”

 The rabbi’s answer reverberates in my mind today.

When I was 20 years-old, a rising junior at Hamilton College with no clear idea what I wanted to do after graduation, for a reason no one has ever explained, my home synagogue, Temple Sharey Tefilo in East Orange, NJ invited me to conduct a summer Shabbat Eve service when the rabbi was on vacation: It was my first sermon ever and I referenced a recent cover of Life Magazine: The photo depicted a beautiful little girl about three years old, held lovingly in the arms of her father.  Both father and daughter were identically clad—in the white robe and hood of the Ku Klux Klan

The message for me—and I hope for the congregation on that summer Shabbat eve—was clear.  We must be taught to hate, but the hope that ignited in my heart and mind that night was that we can also be taught to love.

Events of recent weeks have frustrated us so much!

Have we made any progress at all in civil rights? Has anything changed when a driving a car or committing a minor infraction while being Black can result not in a reprimand but in a death sentence? Have we achieved anything at all when Black parents cannot be sure their children are safe for the night until they lovingly tuck them into bed?

Today is Juneteenth, the day to celebrate the Liberation of those who had been slaves in the United States. But any thoughts I have of celebrating are sullied by frustration and anger over the horrific events of recent weeks. It should not be a capital crime in the land of the free and the home of the brave to drive while Black, to jog while Black, to protest while Black, or even to commit a petty crime while Black.

My frustration at this time calls to my mind God’s frustration in this week’s Torah portion. In parashat Shelach Lecha, God’s frustration with the children of Israel’s total lack of faith is so overwhelming that the Eternal One cries out:  “How long will this people spurn me? Stand back Moses and let me destroy them, and I will make you a new and better people to lead.”

It is a tempting offer, to be sure. Time and again, the people have exasperated Moses with their lack of faith. They complain about having not enough water, they complain about the food available to them in the desert. They build a golden calf, when Moses is gone too long on the mount. And now after all God has done for them, they lack the faith to carry out the mission for which the Eternal One liberated them from Egypt in the first place.

But Moses stays God’s hand.

“God,” Moses  pleads, You can’t destroy the people whom your brought out of Egypt This is Your people, and You have charge me to help You lead them from slavery to show the world a new way of life based on justice, righteousness, caring and compassion. You cannot abandon them now!”

The most wonderful feature of this week’s lesson is: God listens to Moses.  He relents and proclaims the immortal words:

“I have pardoned as you have asked.”

These are the very words we proclaim on the Eve of Yom Kippur after the Cantor concludes the singing of Kol Nidre.

These words give us hope.  If God could forgive the Children of Israel for their horrible sins, then we have reason to believe that if we repent, God will forgive us as well.

The sins the White race have committed against people of color are beyond egregious.  We traveled across the sea to hunt them as animal. We chained them to the holds of ships. We sold them like chattel at slave market, and we have impeded their march to equality at every step along the pages of history since.

Have we made progress? Undoubtedly.

But recent events make it clear how far we have to go.

The miracle of modern technology brings our transgression into sharper relief than ever before.

In the 60s, martyrs of the civil rights struggle like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were just names attached to gruesome but grainy photographs.

Now, we see the brutality played and replayed over and over in living color before our very eyes. Now the faces and the anguish of many of the victims of racism is inescapable:

George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmoud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland, Sam Dubose, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Aiyanna Stanley-Jones, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Atatiana Jefferson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, Trayvon Martin, and too many more—

These are real people. We can see their faces, see the torture they experienced and hear their plaintive cries—some literally ringing in our ears—as an indictment for 2,000 years of kidnapping, murder, exploitation and abuse.

This week’s Torah portion is Moses’ finest our because he urges God not to give up on the people even after they have shown their faithlessness time after time. Moses brings God back from the brink of despair.

Those of us who believe in full equality are also at this time on the brink of despair.  But I hope the message of the Torah resonates with us. We cannot give up. No matter how frustrated and angry we are, we must find the strength to keep writing of our anger, keep speaking out and keep marching.

We may not achieve full equality in our lifetimes, but we must not give in to despair. We must find the strength to continue the struggle and if we do, we too may hope that God will say to us as the Eternal One proclaimed to the children of Israel.

“I have pardoned your sins of the past as your actions demonstrate you have requested.”

So, I come to the end of another Torah Thought.  The portion is different, but like the new rabbi in his congregation, my message is very much the same as I delivered last week and the week before:

God urges us to do all we can to build a society of justice caring equality and compassion.  We still have so much work to do.