MATOT MAASEY 5781

Do you know why you are where you are?

I apologize in advance if what I’m about to say offends anyone. Today’s Torah reading is surely a candidate for one of the most boring Torah portions of the year with passages like: “They journeyed from A and they camped at B; they journeyed from B and they camped at C; they journeyed from C and they camped at D, and on and on.” It reads like those trip tickets that Triple-A used to have…and unless you are a geographer or someone planning a trip through this area, this long list of names of places that you have never heard of before and that you have no desire to hear about again can seem a bit, can I say, tedious?

So why is it in the Torah? And even worse, the list ends before the Jews arrive in the Promised Land! After all these starts and stops the Torah portion ends just before we get to the destination. It’s like recounting the stops we made as we drove across country on our family vacation and never bothering to mention that after all these stops we arrived at our destination. What sense does that make?

There are different explanations offered by our commentaries, but since many of us are traveling these summer weeks, I thought I’d share with you what I consider a most profound approach. I’ve done a good deal of traveling in my lifetime—usually for sight seeing or to see family or attend a family function or for rabbinical meetings. But sometimes unintended things happen along the way.

 

A couple of good examples happened wheI was single. Before I met Cheryl, I traveled to Florida, NY, NJ, Israel and Houston in my quest to find a suitable mate—only to meet the love of my life, Cheryl, 7 miles away in Sandy Springs. Before I met Cheryl, after spending precious time and money—more often than I would like—after meeting face-to-face, I didn’t always know why I bothered to make such an effort.

But this parsha makes clear that while my reason for travel might have included an introduction…my presence in these places at that time was no coincidence and that Gd had placed me there for a specific reason. For example: I was able to help a woman secure a get (Jewish divorce) in NY, so she could remarry. I was able to help a woman in Houston—who was raised as a Christian—discover that she was actually Jewish—and with my rabbinic contacts around the country, I was able to secure proof.

Once, after attending a Rabbinic conference in NJ. I experienced a 2-hour delay in Newark airport—which is not unusual for the Newark airport. I sat next to a young man with spiked green hair and a ring through his nose. He saw my kipa and began to ask me questions. It seems that he was estranged from his Jewish family, and after an hour of conversation, I convinced him to give his parents a call. Yes, I may have made the trip with one purpose in mind, but Gd clearly has His own agenda.

The lesson is: How do you know where you are supposed to be? How do you know why you are where you are? And how do you know that, while you are so busy fixating on where you think you ought to be, that you are not missing out on things that are calling out to you right where you are? I wasn’t thinking about Gd or holiness or Divine purpose during these trips. But Gd brought me to those places because that is where I was needed.

According to Kabbalah, there’s a divine spark hidden within everything and we are in the places we find ourselves not by accident but in order to redeem the holy sparks that are present there. Everything calls to us: Hineyni, “Here I am, pay attention.” But are we listening? Every situation wants to positively change us, but we are more focused on changing the situation. We hurry life along to get to “the point,” as if we know where and what the point really is.

It may sound cliché, but the journey is the point—the opportunity to hear the call and to respond to it. There’s an old Chassidic story of the yeshiva student who hungered to someday, somehow, meet Eyliyahu Hanavi (Elijah the Prophet)—who appears, according to legend, often in mysterious ways in every generation. The boy’s father suggested that perhaps, if he would stay up all night and study with purity and devotion, Eyliyahu might come. The student did as his father instructed. He studied fervently all night, but nothing happened. Then, one night, while he was studying, there was a knock on the door of the Bet Midrash study hall. When the student opened the door, there was an old man who asked for something to eat.

      The student was annoyed that this beggar was bothering him, taking him away from his holy studies, and so he gave the man a bit of food and ordered him to leave. The next morning, when he told his father about the intrusion, the father sighed. “That intruder,” said the father, “may just have been the Eyliyahu, and now you have missed an opportunity to spend time with him.”

From that day on, he always welcomed every stranger that he met as warmly as he could, no matter how busy he was—just in case. He grew up to become a famous scholar and a much-respected tzadik (righteous person), but whether he ever again had the opportunity of meeting Eyliyahu Hanavi or not—no one can say.

It’s a lovely story. But it’s more than just a story. It’s a reminder to us all that the journey is as important as the goal, and that if we keep our eyes and hearts open along the way, we may learn more as we travel than we will from the goal of our trip.

The whole trick of a spiritual life is to be where you are, to really be in the moment and in the place that you find yourself in, and not to be so possessed and not to be so focused on the place towards which you are going that you don’t see the Divine sparks that call out to you on the way 

Perhaps this is the point of our Torah portion. It teach us that we need to pay attention to the place that we are in—even as we travel. Kids will say: “Are we there yet?” But wise people travel with their eyes and hearts open, for who knows? We may not want to be in this place that we are passing through, but Gd may want us to be here—completely here—awake and alive to where we are and to what is going on around us. 

The Torah records every stop that the Jews made in their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land in order that we might realize and understand that there may be all kinds of Divine sparks along the way calling to us and pleading for our attention if we but take notice of them.

My friends, wherever we travel this summer, wherever we go in life, may Gd help us to keep our eyes and hearts always open on our journey through life to the holy sparks right in front of us. Amen!             

DEVARIM 5781

Tisha B’Av, Could It Happen Here?

Why does anti-Semitism—Jew hatred—have such power? It’s a great mystery that, perhaps, only Gd knows. We see it in our Torah reading where Moses reviews for the people how when they asked permission—as they were travelling through the desert to the Promised Land—to pass through other people’s land, they were not only refused, but attacked for no reason other than that they were Jews! We see it in the litany of the worst tragedies ever to befall us—all of them happened on Tisha B’Av (the 9^th day of the Jewish month of Av) which we commemorate tonight and tomorrow. And we see it today.

Only just a few years ago it looked like anti-Semitism had all but disappeared in America. In fact, 10 years ago I spoke about a new phenomenon—about how being Jewish was so cool, as we heard in Adam Sandler’s famous “Hanukkah Song,” describing how many famous people are really Jewish. Let me read you a bit from my Rosh Hashanah sermon that year: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes picked the name Suri—a Biblical variant of Sarah—for their daughter. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt named their daughter “Shiloh”—after the Biblical city where the Tabernacle was placed by King David. We have Madonna studying Kabbalah, not holding concerts on Shabbos and visiting Israel for Rosh Hashanah. Mattisyahu, a Lubavitcher Chassid clad in black hat and tzitzis, is now atop the rap music charts. There were 2 Orthodox contestants on “The Apprentice.” On the “National Spelling Bee” 2 of the words used for the contestants were: Yizkor and Hechsher. The Wall St. Journal reports that non-Jewish children in Long Island are asking for Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties so that they can also be lifted on a chair and celebrated.

         There has been a recent trend for non-Jewish celebrities to wear Jewish jewelry. Sarah Palin sometimes wears a big Magen David pendant and Elijah Wood has a ring inscribed with a quote from Pirke Avot, Im lo achshav eymatai, “If not now when?” Then there are all those red-string bracelets worn by Madona, Demi More and Ashton Kutcher—not to mention Justin Beiber’s new Hebrew tattoo he got in Israel. What in the world is going on? It all leads to inescapable conclusion that Jewish is really cool.

         Well, it’s 10 years later and being Jewish is not so cool anymore. Anti-Semitism has surfaced yet again, and in a big way. Jews constitute just 2% of the US population, but they are the victims in more than 60 % of religion-based hate crimes, according to the FBI's most recent Hate Crimes Statistics report. We see in the media subtle and not so subtle accounts of verbal anti-Semitism by high officials and intellectuals, and anti-Semitic physical attacks by common street thugs. Here’s a few examples:

• During the Gaza war last month, we saw Jews attacked at kosher restaurants in Los Angeles and New York, with attackers attacking only if they admitted they were Jews!
• On July 1^stwe had the stabbing of Rabbi Shlomo Noginski outside Shaloh House—the Jewish day school and synagogue in Boston's Brighton neighborhood. 24-year-old Khaled Awad, was formally charged with a hate crime. 
• Last month April Powers lost her jobas chief equity and inclusion officer for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. What was her crime? It was posting a message on social media deploring, “the increase in hate speech and random violence against Jewish people.” Astonishingly, that post generated a furious backlash because it didn’t mention Islamophobia. Powers, who is black and Jewish, was forced to resign and inundated with death threats.
• Also, last month, a Philadelphia festival, Eat Up the Borders, billed as “a curated event celebrating diversity through food,” cut Moshava, an Israeli food truck from the event, citing “the concerns of community.” One complaint read: “I’m absolutely disgusted by the cultural appropriation of Palestinian food in this event. I will definitely not be attending and telling all my friends the same.” Notice how they word it—it sounds like justice. It sounds like inclusivity and openness. This is how antisemitism becomes mainstream.”
• During the Gaza war, the NY Times—along with most of the media—had op-ed after op-ed condemning Israel, but not a single op-ed—while 5 thousand missiles were falling on Israel’s population centers—not a single op-ed in the American newspaper of record with one positive word about Israel! What none of the op-eds made mention of—none—was that Hamas calls for not just the destruction of Israel, but for the destruction of Jews—me and you
• This is all in addition to the constant anti-Semitic rants of Rashida Talaib and Ilhan Omar, and the insult we feel when their democratic colleagues refuse to condemn them. 

         Jeff Jacoby writes in aish.com (How Jew-Hatred is Different from Other Forms of Prejudice 7/12/21): Anti-Semitism is something else. The most dangerous anti-Semites don’t regard Jews or Judaism as inferior but as the embodiment of what they revile most. For millennia, anti-Semites have identified Jews with whatever in their worldview was uniquely detestable or treacherous: Medieval Christians abominated Jews for not worshiping Jesus. Communists painted Jews as greedy bourgeois capitalists. Industrialist Henry Ford accused Jews of manipulating the global economy. The Nazis depicted Jews as vermin polluting German racial purity…Black nationalists smear Jews as racists who caused the slave trade and Jim Crow. Haters of Israel ostracize Jews for supporting the Jewish state. Anti-Semitism has existed for as long as Jews have existed, shape-shifting to fit the times. It has proved the most ineradicable of hatreds because, like a virus, it mutates…

         It was easy for progressives and Democrats to express horror when a right-wing murderer opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, but many were reluctant to condemn the numerous attacks on US Jews and Jewish institutions by anti-Israel fanatics during the recent fighting in Gaza.”

As Dr. Martin Luther King jr. responded when approached by a student who attacked Zionism: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews—and you’re talking antisemitism!”

And now, many American Jews have not only become complacent, they’re ignoring it or worse, joining the fray. It is unbelievable to me that when asked (poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute) if they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “Israel is an apartheid state,” 25% of American Jews agreed! Additionally, 34% agreed with the statement: “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the U.S.,” and 22% agreed that, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” Really?? Genocide?? Does Israel have gas chambers and crematoria?

“Let’s be realistic,” David A. Harris—executive director of the American Jewish Committee—wrote, “Given its longevity, anti-Semitism in one form or another is likely to outlive us all…at least, however, the ability of Jews to stand up to anti-Semitism is greater today than it ever has been.” And he’s right! We can fight it, but we must speak out forcefully and never let up. And we must do that with even our own people—especially our children—so many of whom are grossly ignorant of the dangers of anti-Semitism.

And if we do, with Gd’s help, we just may prevent another Tisha B’Av tragedy. Amen!

MATOT MAASEY 5781

Do you know why you are where you are?

I apologize in advance if what I’m about to say offends anyone. Today’s Torah reading is surely a candidate for one of the most boring Torah portions of the year with passages like: “They journeyed from A and they camped at B; they journeyed from B and they camped at C; they journeyed from C and they camped at D, and on and on.” It reads like those trip tickets that Triple-A used to have…and unless you are a geographer or someone planning a trip through this area, this long list of names of places that you have never heard of before and that you have no desire to hear about again can seem a bit, can I say, tedious?

So why is it in the Torah? And even worse, the list ends before the Jews arrive in the Promised Land! After all these starts and stops the Torah portion ends just before we get to the destination. It’s like recounting the stops we made as we drove across country on our family vacation and never bothering to mention that after all these stops we arrived at our destination. What sense does that make?

There are different explanations offered by our commentaries, but since many of us are traveling these summer weeks, I thought I’d share with you what I consider a most profound approach. I’ve done a good deal of traveling in my lifetime—usually for sight seeing or to see family or attend a family function or for rabbinical meetings. But sometimes unintended things happen along the way.

 

A couple of good examples happened wheI was single. Before I met Cheryl, I traveled to Florida, NY, NJ, Israel and Houston in my quest to find a suitable mate—only to meet the love of my life, Cheryl, 7 miles away in Sandy Springs. Before I met Cheryl, after spending precious time and money—more often than I would like—after meeting face-to-face, I didn’t always know why I bothered to make such an effort.

But this parsha makes clear that while my reason for travel might have included an introduction…my presence in these places at that time was no coincidence and that Gd had placed me there for a specific reason. For example: I was able to help a woman secure a get (Jewish divorce) in NY, so she could remarry. I was able to help a woman in Houston—who was raised as a Christian—discover that she was actually Jewish—and with my rabbinic contacts around the country, I was able to secure proof.

Once, after attending a Rabbinic conference in NJ. I experienced a 2-hour delay in Newark airport—which is not unusual for the Newark airport. I sat next to a young man with spiked green hair and a ring through his nose. He saw my kipa and began to ask me questions. It seems that he was estranged from his Jewish family, and after an hour of conversation, I convinced him to give his parents a call. Yes, I may have made the trip with one purpose in mind, but Gd clearly has His own agenda.

The lesson is: How do you know where you are supposed to be? How do you know why you are where you are? And how do you know that, while you are so busy fixating on where you think you ought to be, that you are not missing out on things that are calling out to you right where you are? I wasn’t thinking about Gd or holiness or Divine purpose during these trips. But Gd brought me to those places because that is where I was needed.

According to Kabbalah, there’s a divine spark hidden within everything and we are in the places we find ourselves not by accident but in order to redeem the holy sparks that are present there. Everything calls to us: Hineyni, “Here I am, pay attention.” But are we listening? Every situation wants to positively change us, but we are more focused on changing the situation. We hurry life along to get to “the point,” as if we know where and what the point really is.

It may sound cliché, but the journey is the point—the opportunity to hear the call and to respond to it. There’s an old Chassidic story of the yeshiva student who hungered to someday, somehow, meet Eyliyahu Hanavi (Elijah the Prophet)—who appears, according to legend, often in mysterious ways in every generation. The boy’s father suggested that perhaps, if he would stay up all night and study with purity and devotion, Eyliyahu might come. The student did as his father instructed. He studied fervently all night, but nothing happened. Then, one night, while he was studying, there was a knock on the door of the Bet Midrash study hall. When the student opened the door, there was an old man who asked for something to eat.

      The student was annoyed that this beggar was bothering him, taking him away from his holy studies, and so he gave the man a bit of food and ordered him to leave. The next morning, when he told his father about the intrusion, the father sighed. “That intruder,” said the father, “may just have been the Eyliyahu, and now you have missed an opportunity to spend time with him.”

From that day on, he always welcomed every stranger that he met as warmly as he could, no matter how busy he was—just in case. He grew up to become a famous scholar and a much-respected tzadik (righteous person), but whether he ever again had the opportunity of meeting Eyliyahu Hanavi or not—no one can say.

It’s a lovely story. But it’s more than just a story. It’s a reminder to us all that the journey is as important as the goal, and that if we keep our eyes and hearts open along the way, we may learn more as we travel than we will from the goal of our trip.

The whole trick of a spiritual life is to be where you are, to really be in the moment and in the place that you find yourself in, and not to be so possessed and not to be so focused on the place towards which you are going that you don’t see the Divine sparks that call out to you on the way 

Perhaps this is the point of our Torah portion. It teach us that we need to pay attention to the place that we are in—even as we travel. Kids will say: “Are we there yet?” But wise people travel with their eyes and hearts open, for who knows? We may not want to be in this place that we are passing through, but Gd may want us to be here—completely here—awake and alive to where we are and to what is going on around us. 

The Torah records every stop that the Jews made in their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land in order that we might realize and understand that there may be all kinds of Divine sparks along the way calling to us and pleading for our attention if we but take notice of them.

My friends, wherever we travel this summer, wherever we go in life, may Gd help us to keep our eyes and hearts always open on our journey through life to the holy sparks right in front of us. Amen!             

PINCHAS JULY 4^th 5781

Gd Bless America, the Real Story

 

Tomorrow, for me is a sacred day—July 4^th, the 245^th anniversary of the founding of America. Today there are many people who are not so fond of America—calling it a racist country. From my perspective, while there are hateful people here as everywhere else, while we as a country still have some ways to go to get where we should be…for me I’m so proud to be an American, and one of the reasons is precisely because of how far this country has come in dealing with racism in my lifetime.  

And I’m so proud to be an American because America welcomed Jews fleeing oppression when no one else would have us. Yes, we had to struggle for our rights and to be accepted, but we have persevered. Let no one tell us that we should feel guilty because of our “white privilege.” 1^st of all, the Jewish community is really not that white, and 2^nd of all, with all the renewed anti-Semitism in America these days, are we really privileged? Jews, precisely because we appreciate the American values of freedom, liberty and equality, are always in the forefront of the struggle to bring those values to everyone.

If you spend any time watching the news these days, you mainly hear about what’s wrong with America: besides racism, people say there’s the inequity of people who have so little and people who have so much; there’s our cancel culture, where Gd forbid you said something wrong 10 years ago and it was captured on video, your life could be ruined; social isolation is pervasive; ours is a disposable culture; and most of all there is a great ignorance of world affairs because most people get their news from FaceBook and its ilk.

Despite some embarrassing realities, however, America remains the hope and promise of the world. It’s one of the only countries where, when a ruling party is voted out of office, the transition proceeds so smoothly. If America is so bad, “Why is it,” as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “that this is the only country in the world where everyone wants to get into, and no one wants to leave?” And so, even celebrities who threaten to leave if so and so is elected, never do!

To be sure there are many special things about America. I did some research and here’s a sampling of what I found: 

Only in America......can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.

Only in America......are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.

Only in America......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.

Only in America......do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke.

Only in America......do we leave cars worth tens of thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.

Here’s my favorite: Only in America......do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.

To these I add:

But only in America could an African American raised by a poor single mother become president.

        Only in America could we go from 25,000 to 6 million Jews—becoming the largest Jewish community in the world in just a century and in the process save Jewish life from vanishing from persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust.

I believe, as Michel Medved was fond of saying, that “this is the greatest country on Gd’s green earth.” With all its imperfections, the birthday of America, which we celebrate tomorrow, is a day that we Jews ought to celebrate with such joy and gratitude. America gave Jews a place of refuge during the worst times of our history—a place of freedom that allowed us to grow into increasing acceptance and prosperity. It is no wonder that the song that most epitomizes the blessings of America— “Gd Bless America”—was written by a Jew: Irving Berlin.

It was “Gd Bless America” that we sang after 9/11 and not the “Star Spangled Banner.” It was heard spontaneously on the steps of the Capital that day with black and white, Democrats and Republicans holding hands as they sang because that’s what America is all about.

In her book, Gd Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, Sheryl Kaskowitz reveals its amazing story. Irving Berlin originally wrote “Gd Bless America” for a 1918 revue that included among its sundry delights a blackface number and a drag routine—all performed by a cast of WWI American soldiers. But the song was cut from the show before opening night. Berlin dug “Gd Bless America” out of the proverbial wastebasket in the fall of 1938 after radio superstar Kate Smith asked him for a patriotic song to sing on her show for Armistice Day.

Irving Berlin, a Belarusian Jewish immigrant who grew up speaking Yiddish, did not fail to notice that the premiere of “Gd Bless America” in the United States coincided with Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in Germany—a night that for many marks the beginning of the Holocaust!

Kaskowitz writes: By 1940, “Gd Bless America” seemed to be everywhere. The Brooklyn Dodgers played it at every home game that year—soon all of baseball adopted it—and both the Democrats and the Republicans incorporated it into their conventions and campaigns…Several anti-Semitic groups predictably targeted “Gd Bless America” as evidence of an imagined Jewish conspiracy, though the pro-Nazi German American Bund embraced the tune for a time at its New Jersey retreat—that is until they called for a boycott of the song upon discovering that it was written by a Jew.”

Certainly, as Jews, the song, “Gd Bless America,” is close to our hearts. My friends, let’s celebrate the 4^th of July tomorrow as a real Yontif. Let us not say Tachanun—a prayer not said on Jewish holidays—when we pray that day. Let us be grateful for America which has saved the world through 2 world wars, taught the world about freedom and democracy, and modeled for the world that welcoming others makes you stronger, not weaker.

In our Torah reading, Gd blesses Pinchas with a Brit Shalom (a Covenant of Peace) for defending Gdly principles. May Gd bless America with a Covenant of Peace as it defends the Gdly principles of liberty, freedom and justice for all. Amen!

On this Shabbos before July 4^th let us rise and sing together “Gd Bless America”:

Gd Bless America,

Land that I love.

Stand beside her, and guide her 

Thru the night with a light from above. 

From the mountains, to the prairies, 

To the oceans, white with foam 

Gd bless America, My home sweet home.