Tonight for my sermon I want to talk about a makhloket, so first I have to define what that term means. A makhloket is that component of a dialogue where a disagreement is discovered. It’s not necessarily acrimonious but it’s a place where two sides fundamentally disagree. And in some ways it makes up the heartbeat of Judaism: throughout the centuries, the millenia, a back and forth, always striving to discover truth, holiness; recognizing that only in conversation and dialogue, dialectic, can that firm bridge of truth we’re all trying to traverse be discovered.
So I want to talk about a makhloket, but not just any maklhloket, I want to talk about one of the more fundamental makhlokets of the 20th century, between two of its most renowned sages Rabbis Yochanan and Baruch, or more accurately John Lennon and Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan was and is an iconoclast, always smashing the conceptions and beliefs of what even his most ardent followers held to be true. When he evolved from folk music to rock he was called a sellout. When he shifted from acoustic to electric, he was initially booed off stage. But it was later that he really disappointed his fans, this grandson of Jewish immigrants who had escaped the pogroms, temporarily flirting with evangelical christianity, a period in his life he now disavows.
And yet it’s a piece from this era of his life that leads to our makhloket and brings us to what I want to talk about tonight. The opening track from his 1979 blues rock album Slow Train Coming was ominously titled “Gotta Serve Somebody.”
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
John Lennon, who at one point in his career seemingly idolized Dylan, taking cues from Dylan to push the Beatles towards more substantial, introspective, politically-oriented material, was appalled. “Gotta Serve somebody?” he scoffed? “What kind of independent, free-spirit is this?” And so he penned a scathing response entitled “Serve yourself.”
You tell me you found Jesus Christ,
Well that’s great, and he’s the only one.
You say you just found Buddha,
Sittin’ in the sun.
You say you found Mohammed,
Kneeling on a carpet, facin’ the East.
You say you found Krishna,
With a bald head, dancin’ in the street.
You got to serve yourself, man
Ain’t nobody gonna do for you.
Lennon may have been channeling our own Ancient Sage Rabbi Hillel when he wrote this song. As Rabbi Hillel so famously is quoted as saying in Pirkei Avot, an entry in our sacred canon, im ein ani li mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Lennon, as I imagine him, was responding to a very particular experience.A world where patriarchal hierarchy had predominated for millenia. A world where jingoistic worship of the flag was used to subjugate those with less power. A world where what the priest says goes, and where God as a stern father figure meting out punishment to the unworthy was an implicit if not explicit framework that underlay mainstream society.
So he was rebelling against service to this purportedly omnipotent father, embracing instead an ethos of following your instinct, living life to the fullest.
On this latter point, Dylan might not have disagreed with him. Yes, live life to the fullest, he might say. But that is going to entail service beyond the self. Or, to continue the Rabbi Hillel quote, it doesn’t end after אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי If I am not for myself, who will be for me? It continues to .וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי But if I am only for myself what even am I?
Which brings us to the core point of tonight’s sermon. In this disagreement, in this makloket, Jewish sacred tradition clearly and unambiguously sides with Rav Dylan—service to the other; beginning with service to the ultimate source of all being, but then extending to the divinity manifesting in this world of ours, in one another, is the ultimate task with which we are confronted.
Judaism is, by some estimations, an intensely legally-oriented religion. Or perhaps more accurately, an intensely action-oriented religion. There are 613 mitzvot, 613 actions we are exhorted to carry out, and each of these 613 mitzvot has yielded tomes of commentary on how exactly one should do them. What time, exactly, should we say the shema each day? How many hours must one wait between eating meat and dairy? What shoe should one put on first, the right or the left? Yes there is a Jewish law about this (the right one, if youre curious, but then you tie the left one first). And then of course, the countless laws about caring for one another, and how best to give tzedakah, charity, and so forth.
And in the rabbinic text compiling all of these laws, the shulchan aruch, what is cited as the overriding concern to all of these countless laws, grand and minute in scope? Shiviti adonai l’negdi tamid. Psalm 16:8 I set the divine before me, always.
Everyone of these actions, really every action is as an act of service, an offering to the holy—an acknowledgment that our existence is a gift, that we are granted the gift of life here on this earth, and our life lived is our offering, our act of service in response to that gift.
The word for service in Hebrew is Avodah. This word Avodah has come to mean many different ideas for Jews over the generations, in some ways, evolving with our own understanding of what it means to serve.
Initially, Avodah referred to the sacrificial system. Service came in the form of fire offerings to God, smoke wafting up to the heavens, serving as a reiach nichoach, a pleasing scent to the holy. It was Our expression of our gratitude for life, our expression of our yearning for connection to the divine.
When that system was obliterated through the destruction of the temple, we evolved. Avodah, service, came to refer no longer to animal sacrifice, but rather to, simply, prayer. Avodaht ha’lev. Service of the heart. The prayer service we know today, that we utilize today, in many ways took shape in this period after the destruction of the temple: the amidah, the standing prayer, serving as an echo of those ancient fire offerings, through service of the heart, service of the lips.
My teacher Rabbi Vivie Mayer encapsulates this evolution well in her description of her own evolving relationship to prayer
“For me, what calls me to prayer today, is the mythical equivalent of the daily sacrificial offerings. If, on any given day I am not made more compassionate by my prayer, not uplifted or calmed or inspired, if I don’t feel the psychological benefits I once pursued, my prayer still can work in that I have simply said, Hineini, ‘Here I am.’ I step forward into prayer as if I am expected, as if I am being asked for, and I am ready to offer myself as the answer.”
In a sense, this articulates the main idea I am espousing: that our lives can be offerings, they can consist of acts of Service to the ultimate Other. As Rabbi Norman Lamm, who passed away this year wrote, human beings must move off the dead center of self-interest and be concerned with others—beginning with the “Capital O” Other—and only then will human beings experience psychic and spiritual nourishment.
Lamm was writing about the Hasidic understanding of Avodah, of service. The Hasidim, an eastern european Jewish mystical movement that continues to influence us, generated what they called avodah be’gashmiyut, service through materiality. This meant that service to the divine was not restricted to moments of overt religious engagement, prayer, torah study, but extended to moments when we are preoccupied with every-day worldly things. The examples they cited included eating, conducting business, and even (perhaps especially) intimate relations among loved ones. Each of these was seen as an opportunity to carry out an act of service to the divine, challenging as that might seem to some of us. Service was no longer restricted simply to those acts we consider to fall in the religious sphere. Life was one long, uninterrupted act of service.
In our generation, avodah, service, often means a more targeted form of service towards a more just world. Avodah, for example, is the name of a leading Jewish communal organization whose mission is to develop lifelong social justice leaders whose work is informed by Jewish values, and they do so by recruiting people to work for a year for anti-poverty organizations and live and learn together in Jewish communities.
In each generation, there have been different manifestations but the through line is the same: Avodah, service, is a core part of what it means to live and to be human. By opening our hearts to service we remove our blinders, allowing the world in its expansiveness to reveal itself to us.
I think it is easier said than done to keep this framing of service to the other, including the ultimate Other in mind. In fact I think Jewish organizations often have trouble with it. Often, when you look at the rhetoric of Jewish organizations for articulating the case for why it is worthwhile to engage in Jewish life, it revolves around notions of meaning: We are invited to attend services because it helps give our lives meaning, engage in Jewish ritual because it gives our lives meaning, belong to Jewish community because it gives our life meaning.
Now first, let me say, I totally agree with all of that. I do think each of those activities can help lend our lives meaning. And I think the framing misses an opportunity.
When we focus on the notion that Jewish life gives us meaning, it focuses the framing on what we get out of this. Why be part of this community? I’ll get something out of it. I’ll get uplifted. I’ll get spiritually enriched. My life will have more meaning. Again, I believe all of that to be by and large true. I think living a Jewish communal life does give one’s life more meaning, and I’ll talk more about that tomorrow. But I think an important paradigm shift is rather than approach Jewish life as something that gives us something, we approach life as a whole as our offering. Our offering to the sacred Other. A means by which we serve.
When it is time for the Israelites, who are wandering in the wilderness, to build God a sanctuary, a space where they can concentrate their energies in order to perform Avodah, service, God says to them וְיִקְחוּ־לִ֖י תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כָּל־אִישׁ֙ יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ Give Me gifts from every person whose heart so moves them so that we can accumulate materials with which to build the sanctuary.
Only, after a closer look at the text, as Rabbi Abraham Weinberg observes, God doesn’t say give me gifts, God says “Vayikhu li terumah” God says take me gifts, or perhaps, Take of Me gifts, Take from the divine, take from an infinite wellspring from which you can draw, in order to give.
And giving in this way, sacred giving, a sacred offering, sacred service, when we give in this way, we seem to draw from that infinite, inexhaustible source. In fact sacred giving seems to contribute to our own wellspring. When we conceive of ourselves as connected to the Other, that their needs are intertwined with our own, our giving, our offering is intimately tied to their receiving, and the two seem to fuel one another.
I see this in real terms with my daughter Lila. In the myriad parenting books I read this year, one of the most powerful insights I read was a simple one. In essence, this author said, it’s not that we care for our children because we love them, although certainly that’s true; but, she observed, more fundamentally, the equation is reversed; our love for our children seems to grow the more we care for them. The act of caring expands our love. Our caring grows our internal wellspring. When in the middle of the night, I’m offering Lila a bottle, her lip still quivering from some upset, assuming I haven’t gone too many nights without sleep, my love for her seems to expand.
It doesn’t mean I don’t get tired of parenting; of course we all do. But fundamentally, tending to her needs fills my heart.
I’m reminded in this moment of that most challenging of our sacred texts, The Giving Tree by Jewish author Shel Silvserstein. For those who aren’t familiar or haven’t read it in a while here is the book report. Tree meets boy, a little boy, and loves the little boy. They play together all the time. The boy swings from the tree’s branches, and hides in the tree, and the boy loves the tree, and the tree is happy. But when the boy grows up, the tree is no longer enough for him. The boy wants money to buy stuff. And a family. And to travel, far away. And the tree keeps giving of herself to help the boy, as he grows older, to meet his needs. First the tree gives him her fruit, then her branches, then trunk, until she is nothing but a stump. The boy, even older now, leaves the tree for long periods of time, until the boy returns in the end, old and alone. At first the tree is concerned because she has nothing left to give the boy. But it turns out all the boy needs is a place to sit and rest. And the tree, we read, straightens herself up as much as she can, and offers herself, her stump, for the boy to sit and rest upon. The boy does so, and, we read, the tree is happy. The end.
It is, for those who are interested in revisiting it, a heartbreaking, heartbreaking story. Heartbreaking because it maps out the passage of time, heartbreaking because we watch the physical deterioration of life, and heartbreaking because we watch one participant in the story give and give and give and the other take and take and take. We are left utterly stunned.
The gender roles in this story are no accident. As men, we seem to often receive the messaging from society that the world is ours for the taking if we would but take advantage of the opportunity, and women seem to receive the messaging, subtly, perhaps not consciously, that their role is to serve. There has to be a better way than this kind of gender dichotomy.
But in any case, our heart is filled with awe at the generosity of this tree. We’re not quite sure we should model ourselves after her; after all, she is just a stump at the end; how can we pour from an empty vessel? And yet we’re not quite sure we shouldn’t either. At each stage of her life she found a way to serve, she saw her well-being, her existence, as being wrapped up in the existence of others. Her putting others first, her finding satisfaction in simple togetherness, leaves us in awe.
We know we can’t give all of ourselves. We know we need to conduct our lives in a sustainable manner. And yet, it is Yom Kippur, and so I want to say, speaking for myself, the reason this book is so poignant to me, even if it seems like it goes too far, is that my instincts so often tend to be more like those of the boy than those of the tree, approaching the world through Buber’s I-it paradigm, rather than I-You, wondering what the world has to offer me, what I can get, what’s in it for me, out of it rather than the reverse. What can I give, how can I serve. How can I live in such a way that recognizes this gift of life that I’ve received. The tree, even if through shock and awe, helps show me there is a more holy way.
So back to our makloket between our beloved sages Ravs Lennon and Dylan. Sure, Lennon has a point. We do need to serve ourselves to some degree, to make sure we have something to give. We need to tend to ourselves. Im ein ani li mi li, as Hillel says.
But I hope we see there’s more to it than that. To me, life appears as a gift. And after being given a gift, it’s our turn to respond in kind. I believe we are invited, called, to offer of ourselves in return, drawing from that infinite wellspring.
When my father graduated from rabbinical school, his final message in his graduation profile, published just a few months before his death, was as follows,”As a rabbi, I hope to take the best of my energies: my heart, my mind, and my guts, place them upon the altar of the Jewish people, and burn them up. May my work be a pleasing offering to the Lord.”
As Rabbi Hillel said, וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי If I am only for myself, what even am I? You Gotta Serve Somebody. Shanah Tovah.
