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I had hoped this week to simply share with you the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night to welcome our 61 new member households who joined over the past year, on the experience of entering a new community, and on the importance, in Jewish tradition, of welcoming and togetherness. I do share that teaching below, and I hope you’ll read it. But events in the Jewish world call, yet again, for us to reflect on our response.
Regular readers of this column will observe that I am pretty unapologetic in my Zionism: the creation of the State of Israel was, in my view, nothing short of a modern miracle for the Jewish people, the culmination of two millennia of yearning for a return to an ancient homeland, delivering a sense of security, dignity, and strength which had seemed unimaginable — or, perhaps only imaginable; not reality-based — for centuries.
And yet it happened. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, one of the most horrific devastations to any people in human history, the Jewish people managed to continue the momentum that had begun just decades before, and establish a state, achieving Jewish sovereignty for the first time in two thousand years, giving many Jewish people a sense of purpose and pride that had seemed otherwise eradicated after the Holocaust.
Of course it was not without its costs. The adage, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” was indisputably false. Other peoples, primarily Arab people, whom we now call Palestinians, absolutely lived there.
And so a balance was struck: how to, on the one hand, secure a home for a perpetually displaced people, the Jews, who had been subjugated in nearly every foreign country they had encountered, culminating in the devastation of the modern horror of the Holocaust, by helping it return to its ancient homeland to which it had maintained ties and yearnings throughout the ages, while on the other hand securing a home for a people who had come to know this land in the intervening centuries and decades, ensuring their dignity as well.
The solution, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, was partition. Two states for two peoples. No expulsion.
By now, we’re familiar with the unfolding narrative: the Jews (not without some internal dissent) accepted the plan, and the Arabs rejected the plan, declaring war on the newly established Jewish state. At the conclusion of that Arab-Israeli war of 1948, an armistice was reached between Israel and surrounding Arab countries, with new borders established, for the time being.
Since that time, we’ve been praying for a solution that would lead to a permanent end to war, and, from the Jewish perspective, the capability for Jews to live in peace, security, and autonomy in the ancient Jewish homeland, alongside the same for Palestinian Arabs, with multiple permutations of what that could look like debated about but never agreed upon.
Never have the mainstream debates about those solutions included the mass expulsion of millions of one of those peoples.
Until this week.
I’m a regular listener to many podcasts about Israel (The Daily Briefing by The Times of Israel, hosted by Amanda Borschel-Dan and Jessica Steinberg, Call Me Back by Dan Senor, Israel Policy Pod by the Israel Policy Form, and the US-based Ezra Klein Show and the New Yorker Radio Hour with David Remnick), with trenchant analysis by all, but none, in my view, holds as beautifully the balance of striving for the uplift of Israel’s body and soul as does For Heaven’s Sake, from the Shalom Hartman Institute, hosted by Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi, whom I had the pleasure of meeting with earlier this year.
Reminiscent of a piece I shared from a couple of weeks ago, they strive both to recognize the importance of establishing Israel’s security and deterrence against hostile foes in the region — whose hostility and threat toward Israel we sometimes fail to fully recognize from the relative safety of United States — while also naming the desire for Israel to lift up the values forged in the crucible of the story of the Jewish people: the recognition that, having lived as strangers (and worse) in the land of Egypt, according to the Torah, we know the soul of the stranger and the oppressed, that they are deserving of our care and consideration, channeling the adage from Hillel: “If I am not for myself who will be for me. But if I am only for myself what am I?” (Pirkei Avot 1:14).
Halevi points out that the proposal to initiate a mass expulsion of Palestinians had really last been made prominent by Meir Kahane, a disgraced Israeli politician (of whom Halevi was a one-time devotee) who was barred from the Knesset (the legislature of Israel) for inciting racism. Such a proposal had otherwise, until recently, been considered within Israeli society to be beyond the pale.
I’m not going to pretend there are easy solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas continues to want to inflict death and suffering on Israel, and thousands of civilians continue to suffer in Gaza, while hostages remain captive. When I have peaceful moments with my daughters, images from Gaza — the hostages and civilians there — flash in my mind. How can I have it so good, while they have it so hard?
But we can do better than a mass expulsion; a proposal of forced immigration by a president who refuses to accept immigrants; a president who campaigned on a reduction of US involvement in foreign arenas proposing an intervention of American troops in one of the most dangerous regions of the world.
We can do better for Israelis; we can do better for Palestinians; we can do better for our values. Those are my views — and my views alone — and I welcome yours.
I also wanted to share the D’var Torah I delivered last Friday at our Shabbat service welcoming our 61 new member households who joined this year:
I’ve been “new” a lot of times in my life; it isn’t always easy.
From grades six through nine, I attended three different schools in four years — I moved from Solomon Schechter Jewish Day School in Elkins Park outside Philadelphia; to Masterman, here in Center City; then cross-country to high school in Eugene, Oregon, where my family moved.
After college, same thing: I moved cross-country from Oregon to Baltimore, Maryland, to spend a year with AmeriCorps VISTA, a volunteer service program, then to Washington DC for another year of AmeriCorps in a different city; then I moved back across the country to go to law school in Berkeley, California, moved to work at different law firms in Palo Alto and San Francisco, and then, finally, moved cross-country again, back here to Philadelphia to start rabbinical school.
So being new to a community is a very familiar experience for me.
But familiar and comfortable don’t always go hand in hand. It can be difficult being new to a place.
You might not be familiar with communal norms: when to stand and sit, when to cover your head or not.
The people may not be familiar; it’s hard to know who to sit next to for a meal.
Even the physical layout is unfamiliar. Where is the restroom, where are the stairs? Why are there six floors in the elevator of what feels like a three-story building?
Fortunately, Jewish community has, woven into its fabric, essentially since its inception, the spirit of welcoming and easing the pathway in for those who are new. In essence, the first Jew, or more accurately, the foremost patriarch of the Jewish people, Abraham, was renowned for his capacity to welcome those who were new, those who weren’t yet comfortable, those who were still finding their way. This shows up in that moment I reference in our Open House Shabbat each year. The moment when Abraham, whose tent was open on all sides, sees three men wandering in the hot sun and sprints out to welcome them, proactively having them sit at his table, not waiting for them to ask.
It reminds me of someone who might be considered Abraham’s latter-day descendant, the Jewish character Benji from the recently Oscar-nominated film, A Real Pain. Anybody seen it?
For those of you who haven’t, A Real Pain is about two Jewish cousins, Dave and Benji, who couldn’t be more different from one another, and who go together on a tour of Poland, where their recently deceased grandmother had escaped the Holocaust years before.
They are part of a tour group of strangers, and Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, notices that another member from their tour group, Marcia, played by Jennifer Grey (of Dirty Dancing fame), is walking alone.
“Look at her,” Benji says to his cousin, Dave.
“Who?” Dave responds.
“That woman, Marcia. She’s walking alone. We should go talk to her.”
“We just met her,” Dave says.
“Yeah, but she’s got this, like, deep sadness behind her eyes, you know?”
“She does?” Dave asks.
“Yeah, you didn’t notice that?” Benji says.
“During the [two-minute group] introductions?” Benji asks. “No.”
“I think we should check on her,” Benji says.
“Benji, maybe she wants to be alone,” Dave says.
“No one wants to be alone, Dave,” Benji responds, and he bounds on after her, striking up a conversation.
Now, I can assure you that, as a father of a two-year-old and a five-year-old, working with people all day long, yes, there are times when someone might want a few minutes to themselves. And yes, I confess that I sometimes have instincts probably more like Dave’s than Benji’s, sometimes shy about striking up a conversation with someone I don’t know. Still, I see the wisdom and the generosity and the hesed, the love and tenderness — from the phrase, g’milut hasadim, acts of love and kindness, which is so central to Jewish living — I see the hesed in Benji’s approach, the love and tenderness in Benji’s approach, racing around, as he does, to welcome others, even if we discover throughout the film that he doesn’t have all of his pain worked out either. There is something very Jewishly sacred in his approach.
Jewish community in general, and Society Hill Synagogue in particular, is created in part to extend this hesed, this love and kindness, to those who are new; to help make newness not hard but sacred.
The word for “new” in Hebrew, as many of you know, is hadash, and the symbol most associated with hadash in Jewish tradition is hodesh, which means month or moon: Rosh Hodesh, a new month; a new moon.
It was Rosh Hodesh this week, the beginning of a new month: the moment when the moon has just completed its cycle of waning, completed its cycle of appearing to shrink, (though, as with all faith, we know it’s there in its fullness the whole time, even if we can’t see it) — the moon has completed its cycle of waning and has begun to wax, growing in appearance, brightening up the night sky. Newness can be difficult, but it also, of course, brings hope, energy, rejuvenation, the possibility of turning a page to a new chapter of life.
If I may be so bold as to say, I believe being involved with the Society Hill Synagogue community, and communities like it, can facilitate that rejuvenation; that nourishment; plugging ourselves into sacred pathways of living that have been honed for generations, and which can help renew us in this one.
Here at Society Hill Synagogue, for example, we have the capacity to welcome in Shabbat each week together, letting the spirit of Shabbat settle within us, the spirit that God’s work of creating the world culminated in rest — recognizing that if God needs to breathe, to exhale, to let go, so do we. We have not come in this world, Shabbat teaches, solely to produce, to perform, to do — but also to be, to live, to recognize the basic blessedness of life.
At Society Hill Synagogue, we welcome Shabbat through a variety of pathways.
Song: Imagining there’s something on our hearts that needs to be let out. As David’s chords soothed King Saul, we allow the Jewish expression of music to give voice to the otherwise inexpressible stirring of our hearts.
Prayer: Recognizing that we all have different relationships to prayer, some just liking to be in a room where others are praying, some reading along with the commentaries of the prayerbook, some holding space for themselves to enter into a conversation with the Divine, whatever that means to each of us.
Learning: Society Hill Synagogue is a space where we can explore what the Divine, what God, means to us, if anything. Where we can explore what being Jewish means. As we so often remind ourselves, the word Israel, Yisrael — we are B’nei Yisrael, the people of Israel — the word Israel means striving, yearning, wrestling with God, derived from the episode in our story where our ancestor, Jacob, wrestles with the mysterious divine figure. Here at Society Hill Synagogue, we hold space — in services, in classes, in community — for people to talk through, to explore, to wrestle and reflect, on their experience of the Divine, however we define that term, however an ambivalent or strong of a relationship we might have to it.
Society Hill Synagogue holds space for all of this to happen in community, recognizing that we are not in this alone — the experience of life alone, the experience of being Jewish, or of journeying alongside Jewish loved ones, alone.
It is an interesting time to be Jewish. Like in many chapters of our history, we are encountering a moment where our Jewishness is not fading to the background, but is rather oh-so-present, an invitation, knocking at the door, asking if it can be a central part of who we are.
Like our exploration of our relationship to the Divine, our exploration of what it means to be Jewish is something that Society Hill Synagogue holds space for us to do together. Through classes; through our expressions of Tikkun Olam like our Food Insecurity Committee and our Get Out The Vote drives; through our communal gatherings from Mah Jongg Club and Book Club, to Men’s Club, to a Rosh Hodesh group; we hold space for gathering together, implicitly and explicitly exploring what it means to be Jewish.
“No one wants to be alone, Dave,” Benji says to his cousin. Even for the occasional introvert like me, I know this to be true. Being new to a community can be hard, can feel lonely; and yet at Society Hill Synagogue, we’re here — and we invite you — to feel a sense of community, a sense of sacred togetherness, to open up space for all of us to figure it out together.
