Sermon Archives

How Can We Be Safe?

As parents one learns to anticipate certain questions from our children. There are other questions which surprise us. 

Many years ago, one of my children asked me “Was Napoleon a ‘Good Guy?”

I was not entirely sure how to answer that question but I knew that I was not the first Jew to contemplate the question.

As Napoleon's army marched into Russia in 1812, Jews in Eastern Europe had to decide whether to support Napoleon or to support the czar. The Jews had no army and no way to materially impact the outcome of the war, but the rabbis among them had to decide whom to support with their tefilot.

Some sided with Napoleon. As his armies crossed Europe, ghetto walls were torn down and Jews were emancipated and given citizenship rights. For these Jews the only blessing for the czar is, “may God keep and protect the czar…far away from us!”

But others, notably among them Rabbi Sheur Zalman, the founding rabbi of Chabad and author of the Tanya sided with the czar. He had already been a political prisoner in Russia and had no illusions about what type of ruler he was, however, he feared freedom more than he feared the antisemitism of the czar. 

“If Napoleon wins,” he reasoned, “Jews will find freedom from oppression and prosperity, but they will become distant from their Heavenly Parent and from the Torah.” “On the other hand,” he continued, “if Czar Alexander is victorious, we will continue to suffer a miserable existence under his rule but we will remain close to God and close to the Torah.”

What is the guarantee of security for our community? Is our community more safe when emancipation and the modern multicultural embrace of diversity overthrows discriminatory laws or is our community more safe when we remain intimate with the Holy Blessed One and cleave to the Torah and its Mitzvot?

In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an assimilated French Jew, stood on trial accused of treason against France.  A young Viennese journalist who was in France to report on the trial witnessed first-hand the antisemitic hatred that was catalyzed and focused by the trial and concluded that the only solution to European antisemitism was a Jewish State, which was also the title of the book that this journalist, named Theodore Herzl, wrote to explain and publicize his idea.

But Herzl and Zionism didn’t actually free Dreyfus from prison. French liberals, marshaled by the writer Emile Zola uncovered evidence that Dreyfus had been framed by the army and after a years-long campaign, and a struggle that divided France, Dreyfus was fully exonerated and even reinstated into the army where he served his country with honor during the First World War.

What is the guarantee of security for our community? Is it having a state of our own where we can be free from antisemitism? Or is it the sort of liberal activism on behalf of human rights and minority rights exemplified by Emile Zola and the “Dreyfusards” of the Third French Republic?

These questions have no simple answers, but the remarkable thing is that for the past eighty years, for the Post-War era in America, Western Europe, and Israel, these questions did not have to be asked.  It was the same enlightenment tolerance that emancipated Western Jews, and gave us the freedom to practice our religion with piety and fervor. It was the same multicultural embrace of diversity that gave us zoning variances to build shuls and mikvahs and yeshivot. The same enlightenment tolerance tore down the walls of the ghetto and gave us the freedom to wear yarmulkes and other distinctive Jewish clothing at work and on the street.  

This week I listened to a recorded conversation with Rabbi Chaim Jachter in which he discussed his experiences as a designer and inspector of neighborhood eruvin across North America. He mentioned four eruvin by name. Two of them were eruvin that he and I collaborated to design or maintain. In Princeton, the university itself committed to fund the construction of an eruv as a crucial piece of religious infrastructure. The same Office of Religious Life that built a fountain for Muslim students to wash their hands and feet before prayer, committed to fund the building of an eruv so a few dozen Shomer Shabbat students could carry their keys on Shabbat. In Chicago, the eruv is written into the schematics and blueprints that the Department of Transportation uses to map the location of each and every utility pole and wire in the city. If a component of the eruv is touched by the city’s construction, the shul is notified in advance. 

Zionism was born in the context of the modern embrace of the right of every people to national self-determination. The State of Israel was born and grew and flourished during the era of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa. The authors of the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights and International Human Rights Law were Jewish supporters of the State of Israel and Israel was one of the first states to adopt the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. 

For the first time in my lifetime, and for the first time in the adult memory of anyone in this room, we have to navigate conflicts between the poles that have represented safety for our community for generations. 

Parashat Shelach contains a dramatic pivot. At the start of the parasha, we were on our way to Eretz Yisrael, just days or weeks from crossing the border. By the end of the parasha we have been informed that it will take 38 additional years before we will complete that journey. This timeline is very evocative for me to read this week. At the beginning of last week I too thought I was just days away from a much-anticipated trip to Israel. By the end of the week I knew that my program was canceled, my flights were about to be canceled,  and it will be many additional weeks before I will make it back to Israel. 

I hope I handle my disappointment in more productive ways than the generation of the midbar.. 

In the immediate aftermath of the harsh sentence there is an event that takes place that is easily overlooked but that can shed light on some of our own dilemmas. 

The Torah tells that the very next morning, a group arose and ascended the hills into Eretz Yisrael saying, “We are prepared to go up to the place that the Lord has spoken of, for we were wrong.”

There is no more dramatic and instant act of teshuvah recorded anywhere in the Torah. And yet this brave journey fails.

“And Moshe said, “Why do you transgress the Lord's command? This will not succeed. Do not go up lest you be routed by your enemies for the Lord is not in your midst.”…Yet defiantly they marched toward the crest of the hill country, though neither the Lord’s Ark of the Covenant nor Moshe stirred from the camp. And the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill country came down and dealt them a shattering blow at Hormah.”

Why does this attempt fail? These pioneers seem so earnest and so noble?  Why was their repentance not accepted? Was it truly necessary to those brave pioneers to wait with their families for another 38 years before the march to Eretz Yisrael could continue?

The Torah is not a book of absolutes and the Torah is not a book about fundamentals. Only God is fundamental. Everything else is contextual. No value: not obedience, not courage, not Eretz Yisrael, is absolute. 

One day earlier, the conquest of Eretz Yisrael would have been a great mitzvah. But at the wrong time, it’s uncalled for. Everything has to be evaluated in its time and context. Every value, every mitzvah, every communication we hear from God has to be evaluated through a process of discernment and deliberation. The meaning of God’s word to us emerges in the debate of a beit midrash. Nothing stands Alone except God in God’s unique solitude.

I don’t have to tell you that we find ourselves in times where old answers and old assurances no longer seem stable. The same university administration might support an eruv and also fail to protect the dignity of Jewish students. The so called “international rules based order” is the only framework, maybe in all of recorded history,  that has allowed small states like Israel to flourish, but, from an Israeli perspective there is a dangerous lacuna in international law as it currently exists which lacks a clear legal and enforceable framework for preventive self-defense—particularly in scenarios involving non-transparent, rogue states pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

When Adam and Chava ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil we brought forth, according to the mystical tradition, a world in which good and evil are mixed and their boundaries are murky. The עֵ֗ץ הַדַּ֙עַת֙ ט֣וֹב וָרָ֔ע was a tree that merged and confused the categories of good and evil. 

And so when Moshe asked the spies to evaluate Eretz Yisrael וּמָ֣ה הָאָ֗רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־הוּא֙ יֹשֵׁ֣ב בָּ֔הּ הֲטוֹבָ֥ה הִ֖וא אִם־רָעָ֑ה “what of the land, is it a good or is it a bad land?,” he was pushing a false dichotomy and every false dichotomy is dangerous and pernicious. Pro Israel vs Pro Palestine vs Pro Iran are all false dichotomies because in the medium and long term, all human beings, in Martin Luther King’s words,“are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Eretz Yisrael is beautiful and is inhabited by frightening adversaries. The land is bountiful and verdant and it devours its inhabitants. We live among kind and decent neighbors who wish us only good things and we also face a rising threat of vicious and violent antisemitism. We are strong and resilient and courageous, and we also feel vulnerable as tiny grasshoppers. 

We have to make wise decisions. That means, among other things, recognizing that in our fallen world, there is no good without some hidden evil. There is no evil without a facet of goodness. False dichotomies lead to foolish decisions. Our ancestors got that wrong when the spies inspired a mass panic of unwarranted catastrophizing. And our ancestors got that wrong when they thought just doing the opposite the next day would be an appropriate and meaningful form of teshuvah. Each moment is unique. Each circumstance is different. Every decision requires careful deliberation. And the outcome of every choice is in the hands of God. 

When we first got married, I used to tell people that Sara and I had worked out a somewhat patriarchal system for making decisions as a couple. Sara made the small decisions and I made the large decisions. And so, Sara decided when we should get married and Sara decided where we would live and how many children we would have and all of the other small decisions. I decided all of the big questions of foreign policy and national policy on behalf of our family.

It has been helpful to me, in this moment of war and crisis, to acknowledge that I am not making any of the big decisions. And so I don’t have to be certain if the Israeli surprise attack on Iran was wise or foolish. I don’t have to decide if the United States should enter the war in a more active way or not. And it doesn’t matter if my predictions are accurate or not and so I can avoid making  a lot of predictions. 

Without trying to predict the unknowable, I hope to enjoy a restful and restorative summer here in America devoting more time to Tehilim than to doom-scrolling.   Without trying to predict the unknowable, I hope to make it back to Israel this winter. 

But there are choices that fall to us which, while smaller in their scope, are significant in their impact, because all of us, together, need to make the decision to express our love and concern for one another and to friends and family and other good people who are now in harm's way. All of us, together, need to make the “small decisions” which in the end are the ones that shape our lives.