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I’m writing to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night when we hosted our Scholar-in-Residence, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, who offered incredible teachings Friday and Saturday.
I gave our scholar-in-residence this Shabbat carte blanche to select a topic to teach about, a right she has earned both by dint of her remarkable professional accomplishments, and from my perspective, because of our families’ history together, about which I’ll share more later. And she chose this deceptively simple and yet potentially transformative two-word phrase: we Jews.
I’d like to take each of those words in turn, keenly aware, as Rabbi Anisfeld is, too, that not everyone in the Sanctuary this evening fits within that phrase. “We” at Society Hill Synagogue, like the Jewish community writ large, increasingly includes people who do not identify as Jewish. They — you — are rather a part of Jewish community because of either one or a combination of the following: 1) you’re part of Jewish community because of the the people you love and support — a spouse, a child, or both — or (2) because you are exploring Jewishness yourself, exploring what it might mean to also invoke this phrase, we Jews. Perhaps not there yet, but on some sort of journey.
In a sense, we’re all on that journey: no one’s identity is static; no one grasps in full what it means to be a Jew or really what it means to be a human being.
Even the proper name for God, in Hebrew, symbolized by the letters Yud – Hey – Vav – Hey, comes from the verb, to be; it connotes a degree of becoming, unfolding, being as a source of vibrancy and dynamism: hamehadesh b’tuvo b’khol yom tamid ma’aseh bereshit, the world is created anew each day. There is no such thing as a fully formed Jew, fully formed human, a fully formed world; we are all in process.
In fact, the very author that Rabbi Anisfeld is invoking as the source of this potentially transformative phrase, “We Jews,” is actually even more famous for a different two-word phrase. The German Jewish philosopher and theologian, Franz Rosenzweig (pictured), was, like most of us, wrestling with his identity for much of his life. Born Jewish, though largely secular during his early years, he actually flirted with converting to Christianity, believing, in a Europe still marred by antisemitism, that doing so would open more doors for him professionally. Before this move, however, he wanted to reexplore his Judaism, and, in so doing, one might say, fell in love with it. He became more, though not completely, traditionally observant. When he was once asked whether he practiced the traditional observance of laying t’fillin, wrapping t’fillin each morning, his answer was not “yes” and it was not “no”; it was “not yet,” his other now famous phrase. He recognized the journey he was on and the capacity for each of our relationships to our Jewishness, and to our whole selves, to evolve.
Still, there is at least in some respects a tension between the recognition that we grow, we evolve, we wrestle over the years, and that there is a core Self within us; a core soul — that we are imbued with a soul of goodness and truth, “Elohai neshama shenatatah bi, tehora hi,” the liturgy says. My God, the soul you have placed within me is pure, or, alternately translated, is essential to who I am. For some of us, this soul is translated through our Jewishness, which we either inherit from our families or which we discover later in life; We often search our whole lives to live in alignment with our core essence, our core self, rooted in the Holy One. “Harhivi mekom ohalekh,” the prophet Isaiah says, “Enlarge the site of your tent… lengthen the ropes,” expand — “viytedotayikh hazeki” “And drive the pegs firm.” Expand, evolve, grow. And be rooted in who you are. For me, that’s part of what I hear when I hear “We Jews.”
Still, I’ve had my own ambivalence with that phrase, on a number of levels. The son of a rabbi, Rabbi Anisfeld’s dear friend, Daniel Kamesar, their friendship from decades ago in many ways the reason she is here this Shabbat — the son of a rabbi, I’ve explored probably every place along the Jewish religious spectrum, from orthopraxis to very secular. From flirting with rabbinical school, to rejecting it to practice law; and then all the way back. The imagery of Jonah often comes to mind for me: feeling deeply called in one direction; running as far away from that call as I can, and then ultimately returning. We Jews.
I want to take each of those words briefly in turn, before we hear more expansively about them from Rabbi Anisfeld over dinner after services.
Word number one: We. As many Jewish leaders lament, it’s a word, an orientation, which has fallen, in many ways, out of favor. The society in which we live has privileged a different pronoun: I. The “I” has been romanticized over the last century or more in American and Western life: each of us pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps; being “self-made;” presidential addresses that no longer exhort us to “ask what you can do for your country,” but rather which proclaim, “I alone can fix it.” Think of classic characters in our culture: Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, beholden to no one: no backstory, no family, and no real allegiance to any community, operating in response to his own moral code. The West has acculturated us to root for and identify with these lone ranger types, whose value is in the way that they live outside the system, not contribute to it.
Contrast this with a paradigmatic Jewish, or should I say Israelite, story, the story of Moses. Yes, Moses as a young man runs off to the wilderness, away from community — but his call is ultimately to serve it, to lead it, bringing a whole people, a whole nation, together, recognizing his fate is intrinsically tied up with that of his people. Being called to understand that despite the appeal of going our own way, our lives can feel richer when lived woven within the fabric of community. I experience this. I can’t tell you how moved I am each time a synagogue member emails a group of fellow members to simply say, we’re not going to be at services this week. That is how deeply they have woven their lives into community. We expect to see them, and if we don’t, they want us to know why.
So that’s the “we” — part of the transformative power of the phrase “We Jews” is simply the way that it anchors us to orient our lives not just as an individual, but as a collective, as a community.
Of course, it’s not just any “we” that this phrase invokes, though any “we” is potentially powerful.
It’s “We Jews,” which includes everything that comes with that word — Jew — the history, the language, the spirit, the pathos — the sorrows and the joys, the migrations and peregrinations to and from the land of Israel, to and from shores all across the world. “Jew,” that word which I wear so proudly, even if my relationship to all of it is still in formation.
The word, Jew, is different from the word Jewish. To state the obvious, “Jewish” is an adjective, Jew is a noun. An adjective describes us; a noun is us. An adjective is a facet of our being, a noun speaks to our very essence, tehora hi, an essence which we can inherit or discover.
In fact, when I hear the phrase, “we Jews,” it invokes for me, perhaps paradoxically, the character of Ruth: Ruth is born as a Moabite, a non-Israelite. She marries an Israelite who dies soon thereafter. When her late husband’s mother, Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, tells Ruth to leave her, to return to Ruth’s own mother’s house, Ruth says no.
Ruth replied: Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you.
For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your
people shall be my people; your God my God
Vatomer Rut al tifge’i vi l’azvekh lashuv:
me’ahorayikh ki el asher telkhi elekh uva’asher
talini alin amekh ami v’elohayikh elohai
וַתֹאמֶר רוּת אַל־תִפְגְעִי־בִי לְעׇזְבֵךְ לָשׁוּב:
מֵאַחֲרָיִךְ כִּי אֶל־אֲשֶׁר תֵלְכִי אֵלֵךְ וּבַאֲשֶׁר
תָלִינִי אָלִין עַמֵךְ עַמִי וֵאלֹהַיִךְ אֱלֹהָי׃
Ruth 1:1
Your people shall be my people; your God my God.
When we invoke the words, “we Jews,” we are, in effect, all Ruth. Each of us is saying to the other, to our fellow Jews, your people are my people, your God my God. We are all throwing in our lot with one another, recognizing our fates are tied up with one another, as they are tied up with all of humanity.
It’s not lost on me that my own mother, Cynthia, who chose to become Jewish after meeting my father, commissioned a piece of art inscribed with Ruth’s words as a gift to her mother-in-law, my grandmother, in the years after my father, their son and husband, died suddenly at the age of 35, forging a best friendship between the two of them. Your people are my people, your God my God. We Jews.
We may have different interpretations of what that phrase means; I’ve had different interpretations of it within one lifetime. Such is the legacy of being a Jew; of being the people of Israel, wrestling with the divine spark at our core. Wrestling with it, which also means forming a profound relationship to who we are. We Jews.
May we all go from strength to strength. Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi K.
