Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5768

Beth Jacob Synagogue, Norwich CT

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

            If you've ever seen a Torah scroll up close, you know that the writing in the scroll is different from the regular print in your prayer book. Some of the letters have little decorative flourishes on them, almost like little crowns. They are known in Hebrew as "tagin" and in English as "jots and tittles," from whence we get the familiar idiom.

            According to the Talmud, Menachot 29b, when Moses was preparing to receive the Torah he saw God affixing these crowns to the text and asked why he had to wait for God to finish them. He was impatient. Couldn't he just receive the Torah unadorned? God replied that in a future generation a great sage will arise who will interpret mounds and mounds of laws from these crowns. Moses asks to see this remarkable teacher and is transported into the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, where he quietly takes a seat in the back row.

            Now, I like to remind people that while we may tend to think of the ancient past as this undifferentiated era "way back then," Rabbi Akiva lived around 1600 years later than Moses, meaning that he lived around 1900 years ago -- so the time from Moses to Akiva is almost the same as the time from Akiva to us.

            At any rate, the Gemara goes on to relate that Moses sat listening to the discussion, found it difficult to follow began to feel faint. Then one of the students asked about a certain law, "how do you know this?", and Akiva replied that "it is a law given to Moses at Sinai," and Moses felt better.

            There are sometimes odd and funny stories in the Gemara, but I don't think their purpose is ever simply to amuse and entertain. They're trying to prove a point. What is this story trying to teach us?

            Why couldn't Moses follow the discussion? And why did it bother him so much? It seems to me that there is a recognition in this story that Judaism has grown and changed, and that the religion as it was practiced in Akiva's day was not identical to that of Moses' day. Remember that Akiva is living after the destruction of the Temple, so that the Judaism he practices and teaches is much closer to ours than to Moses' -- it is the Judaism of the synagogue, the rabbi and prayer, not that of the Tabernacle, the Levitical  priest and animal sacrifice. But of course Moses doesn't know what has happened in the intervening 1600 years. He sees a snapshot, not a movie, so to speak, and comes into a Judaism that is so different than what he knows -- and this is what makes him upset. How could the descendants of the people which he brought forth from Egypt be practicing a way of life that seems to him so different than what he has taught them?

            But when Akiva says that a certain law is "halacha l'Moshe mi-Sinai," a law given to Moses at Sinai, he feels better. Why? I don't think it's vanity on his part. I think it's because he now understands that by invoking Moses' authority, Akiva is demonstrating that there's a continuity with what went before. True, the practice is different, but somehow despite the changes there is an organic connection to previous generations.

            Continuity with what went before. One thing that is generally true about Jews is that we like to talk. And one of the things we like to talk about is "what exactly is Judaism?" Is it a religion, a nation, an ethnicity, a way of life, or any number of other terms which have been used to describe this unique phenomenon?

            I'd like today to propose another way of thinking about Judaism. In Pirkei Avot we read "azeihu chacham? Ha-lomed mi-kol adam." Who is wise? One who is open to learning from anybody. While I don't have the chutzpah to claim the title of "chacham" I will tell you that one of the people from whom I have learned the most is not a rabbi and not a Jew but a Jesuit priest, Fr. James Walsh, one of my professors at Georgetown University. And a few weeks ago I happened upon a speech that Fr. Walsh gave at Commencement back in 1986, the year that I was ordained a rabbi and that my brother graduated from Georgetown.

            In this speech, Fr. Walsh said that

"education is a matter of “conversation.” It has to do with listening to and taking part in a conversation that has been going on for four or five thousand years. It tries to bring you into that conversation, with Shakespeare and Aquinas and Freud and Plato and Isaiah and a great many other people. It forms habits of mind that make you capable of being part of that conversation: reverence, a historical sense, a certain critical (and self-critical) awareness, an ability to enter generously, sympathetically, and imaginatively into the lives and feelings of people of other times and cultures. It forms in you the ability to listen; to go out of yourself; to be friends. And what do you need to take part in this conversation? Why, those same qualities: the ability to listen, to go out of yourself, to be friends. The goal and the way to the goal are the same. In this conversation, there are people who have been at it for some time, who want to bring you in to it—to share with you what they love, and to enjoy it with you as friends.

            It seems to me that much of what Fr. Walsh says about "education" also applies, mutatis mutandis, to Judaism. Yes, we are a religion, but there are many irreligious Jews who still consider themselves Jews. Yes, we are a nation, but most of us don't live in our national homeland or speak our national language. Yes, we are an ethnicity, but more and more Jews today are not biologically descended from Jewish ancestors. What Judaism really is, after all, is a kind of conversation across the generations, or in Hebrew "siach l'dor va-dor."

            If you ask most Conservative or Reform Jews what the central text of Judaism is, they will probably say the Bible or the Torah. But really, our central text is the Talmud. As my rabbinical school professor Jacob Rader Marcus o.b.m. said in class, "the Bible is not a Jewish book. The Talmud is a Jewish book. The only thing the Bible is good for is she'neemar -- as it is written." Or as another professor of mine, Michael Cook, said: "Judaism is not what the Bible says. Judaism is what the Rabbis said the Bible means."

            And what is the Talmud if not precisely a conversation, a siach, about "what the Bible means" and how to live our lives according to its teachings? One of the most amazing experiences a new student of Talmud can have is to follow a sugya, a give-and take discussion about a law or the interpretation of a text, where two sages are debating back and forth and attempting to refute each other, only to pick up a history book or a guide to Talmud study and realize that these two rabbis lived 150 years apart and that one lived in Palestine while the other lived in Babylonia. Obviously, these two sages were not in direct conversation with one another, but their teachings were known. Each had his disciples, and the rabbis of the Talmud were very careful to attribute teachings properly. And so, the editors of the Talmud some 1500 years ago were able to, as it were, reconstruct the conversion that would have taken place between the two -- a conversation across the generations.

            The conversations in the Talmud do not only take place between human beings; sometimes they take place between people and God. After all, it is God's word that the sages are struggling over. Their debates are about how best to live by God's teachings, to serve God and know God and get closer to God. And yet, we are familiar with the story where Rabbi Eliezer and the other sages are debating a point of law and cannot agree, so finally Rabbi Eliezer calls the carob tree, the stream and the walls of the academy to confirm his opinion. These are rejected, of course, since carob trees, streams, and even schoolhouse walls are not necessarily experts in the intricacies of ritual impurity. But then Rabbi Eliezer calls on a Heavenly Voice to confirm his opinion, which is too much for Rabbi Joshua, who in essence tells God to butt out by quoting Deuteronomy back at God. "Lo bashamayim hee," Rabbi Joshua says, "the Torah is not in heaven." And God accepts the rebuke, and does indeed butt out of the discussion.

            How is this tremendous act of chutzpah possible? Doesn't God have the right to participate in the discussion over the meaning of his own words?

            But no, he does not. Because the Torah was given to free human beings. Not only was it given to free human beings, it was accepted freely. Standing at Mt. Sinai our ancestors freely chose to enter into a covenant with God. This covenant was re-affirmed when our people entered the Land of Israel, when Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt the destroyed Temple after the Babylonian exile, and it is reaffirmed each day by Jews who participate in Jewish life, who come to shul or work for Jewish causes or engage in acts of justice and peace motivated by their Jewish heritage.

            We often ponder why the world is not a better place, why human evil and stupidity and mere obliviousness lead to so much suffering. God could have created a world without all that, but what kind of world would that be? It might be better, perhaps, if we did not have the ability to choose, but I suspect that in such a world the leading cause of death would be boredom.

            So God created us with freedom. The basic axiom of the Jewish system is that God gave us the Torah, but the right and duty to interpret is given over to human beings. God wants us to be good, to be faithful, to observe the Torah. But God did not create us as robots. In this way God is like a parent to us. Yes, we want our children to do the right thing, but we want them to do it because they understand that they should, not merely because we tell them to. If they arrive at the correct conclusion on their own, there is a far greater likelihood that they will integrate it into their lives and continue on the right path.

            The goal of Judaism is not individual salvation. It is to create a holy community -- a kehila kedosha, a term which most synagogues, including ours, have in their legal Hebrew names. This kehila, this community, functions on many levels -- the family, the synagogue, the regional, national and world Jewish communities, and the State of Israel.

            This notion of a kehila kadosha is the main reason that I left Reform Judaism even though I was originally ordained as a Reform rabbi. The main philosophical principle of contemporary Reform Judaism is "autonomy" -- that each individual has the right and the duty to decide for themselves what they will or won't do. What gets lost, I think, is the responsibility to others besides oneself. Precisely because Judaism is lived in community, I am responsible not only to myself but to the others members of that community. If I am to say Kaddish, you must come to the minyan. If Mr. and Mrs. X's children are to have a religious school, Dr. Y must agree to teach and Ms. Z must agree to be the religious school principal.

            So we are responsible to each other, and therefore we must converse with one another. Our conversation is about what God wants of us, how to best implement our understanding of God's demands in our lives, how to strengthen our community and how to make the world a better place. But our community is not just a random collection of individuals; our community is a Jewish community. That is why our conversation must be a conversation among the generations, siach l'dor va-dor.

            We have a responsibility to past generations. We are Conservative Jews because we are committed to conserving the Jewish tradition. But we are not "preservative" Jews nor are we curators of a museum. We are not obligated to live our lives precisely as our ancestors did, but we should be able to feel that, like Moses in Akiva's classroom, they would recognize in some way the ties that bind us to them and the continuities from their way of life to ours.

            We are not preservative Jews because our responsibility is not only to the past, it is also to the future. The Midrash tells us that the soul of every Jew who ever would live stood at Sinai to receive the Torah. So our conversation between generations includes not only the past but the future as well. We must consider not only what will work best for us in the present and how we maintain our continuity with the past, but also what will best serve future generations.

            In the congregation I served in Pennsylvania, there was one congregant who had fought a bitter and lengthy, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to keep the congregation from becoming egalitarian, adopting the triennial Torah reading cycle, and implementing other modernizations. He would come into my study almost every Monday morning to complain about what had happened the previous Shabbat. One day he asked me, "Rabbi, why do we have to make all these changes?" I said that if we didn't, there would probably be no congregation in five years.

            He said to me, "Rabbi, I am an old man. In five years I probably won't be around anyway, and my children have moved out of town, so I really don't care whether or not there will still be a shul after I'm dead. I don't want any more changes."

            What I found so disturbing in our conversation was not his opposition to change, it was his utter disregard for the needs of others and the future of the shul. There is a Hebrew term which is often used in rabbinic literature, "machloket l'shem shamayim" -- a dispute for the sake of heaven. A machloket l'shem shamayim is a respected, even a holy thing. Jewish concepts and practices are important, and important things are worth fighting over. But if there is no sense of responsibility to the community, to past and future generations, it is not a Jewish conversation and not a machloket l'shem shamayim.

            Fr. Walsh wrote what he did about education because he is committed to the idea that education is about more than simply acquiring useful skills and/or credentials which will help you get a well-paying job. It is about learning to be a certain type of person, one who can listen, who can go out of himself or herself, and be friends. Judaism is about those things as well, and more. It is also about connecting to God, connecting to the Land of Israel, and connecting to the Jewish people, past, present and future.

            The Jewish year which begins today is 5768, which is spelled in Hebrew Tav Shin Samech Heh. Just as in English we know this year simply as "07", in Hebrew this year is Samech Heh which spells Sach or Siach, conversation.

Again quoting my teacher Fr. Walsh,

"In this conversation, there are people who have been at it for some time, who want to bring you in to it—to share with you what they love, and to enjoy it with you as friends.

            As a rabbi, more than anything I want to bring you into the Jewish conversation, siach l'dor va-dor, the conversation between generations. May this year 5767, Tav Shin Samech Heh, become for us sh'nat hasiach, the year of conversation.