This piece was printed today in the Journal News as a Community View. Oddly, they do not name the writer. You can read it by clicking here.
Churches, synagogues, and mosques across our county will come together this month for Interfaith Thanksgiving Services. When we plan them, we will schedule them around the town's recreational youth sports schedule, NFL games, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We clergy are smart: we know that if we don't schedule them around these things, nobody will show up. Really, who can blame people? At least in reality television one can actually glimpse moments of emotion, even if manufactured. At your standard interfaith service, the absence of emotion, innovation, and drama tends to lead to such a mind-numbing, soulless experience that scheduling a root canal in its place is a good alternative. At least in the dentist's chair one may actually pray.
After the terror attacks of September 11th, interfaith work had a clear mission: we felt compelled to highlight the universal qualities of all religious traditions. This made sense in the moment. We needed to believe we were unified in order to commence the healing process. Islam is Christianity is Judaism. We are all the same. But this is patently untrue; we are not all the same. Though all religions share some universal elements, they differ significantly in theological doctrine, the nature of community, and ritual practice. The mandate of interfaith work is to cultivate the courage to face these differences and explore them with tolerance and respect, not gloss over them. If we want to build a society in which we can be neighbors and not just people who live next door to one another, we have to acknowledge the significant differences between us.
The typical interfaith service removes all potentially offensive references, which on the surface seems sensible. But in doing so, we create a medley of insipid readings that barely resemble prayer at all. For example, one of the forbidden fruits of such services is Christological references because they make us (the Jewish community) uncomfortable. We are particularly sensitive to notions of supersessionism, proselytism, and forced conversion, so attending a service with explicit references to Jesus as savior has echoes of a troubling and threatening past. But let's be honest, what is Christian prayer without references to Christ? When we construct the liturgy of these services in order to find a common denominator, we eliminate the compelling elements of prayer that have moved generations of people to feel connected to something infinite. We end up with something closer to trite, adolescent poetry than artful masterpieces of a liturgical tradition.
Community organizations that sponsor interfaith events often measure success by the bottom line: the number of people who showed up. But this type of work requires more than the presence of warm bodies. We must build enough trust between disparate groups so that they will be able to speak to one another about the differences between them, differences in theology, spiritual resonance, and moral boundaries. This happens when small groups meet consistently over time in order to cultivate relationships. It is important that the Westchester community is aware that this happens among our clergy on a regular basis. Through the Westchester Inter-Religious Clergy Network (www.wicn-ny.org), clergy of all faiths and denominations study together and forge collegial and professional relationships. There is great value in large programs in which sizeable swaths of the community come together: they can be deeply moving demonstrations of solidarity. But this solidarity can be fleeting when it is not founded on sincere and meaningful encounters of the otherness between us, which by definition, must happen in small groups over time.
As each town and city across the county plans their Thanksgiving Interfaith Services, perhaps we can re-imagine them as opportunities for each faith tradition to communicate the elegance of an unedited liturgical piece. Everyone present will have moments of being on the outside looking in, which will undoubtedly be uncomfortable. But it is through this discomfort that we grow, that our own beliefs and dreams come into clearer focus, and that we begin to understand our neighbor's "peculiar ways." Minimally, folks will walk away actually feeling something during the service. At a time when the rhetoric in our political and civic life is increasingly divisive and listening is a rare commodity, religious communities are poised to build bridges and unify. We can lead the charge for restoring civility to our public discourse, not by hollow expressions of unity, but through the cultivation of relationships strong enough to transcend the substantial differences between us. This would be the paramount veneration of Thanksgiving.
This is a sermon delivered on October 31st at the Pelham Jewish Center.
It is now official.A new question sits on top of my list of “Questions Most Frequently Asked of a Rabbi.”If I am an adequate measuring stick of such things, rabbis are most frequently asked some version of, “So rabbi, how does a Phillies fan handle being the rabbi of a congregation full of Yankees fans?”I am so glad that I spent six years of my life studying Aramaic so I would be prepared for such questions! The question suggests that I may be experiencing some form of an existential crisis, and I suppose that to some degree, I am.
For starters, throughout the baseball season most congregants have been very supportive of the Phillies’ trajectory to the postseason.“Way to go!”“Wow, it’s nice to see Pedro pitch so masterfully” or “Ryan Howard has an unstoppable bat” were common things for me to hear throughout the season.Suddenly, all of that changed.No more congratulatory pats on the back after a Philly victory.Such niceties have been replaced by things like, “May the Phillies bats go silent.”Congregants have resorted to forwarding me pictures of Phillies ballplayers in skirts from that bastion of quality news reporting, the New York Post.But don’t worry about me.I am dealing with this situation in a very healthy way: I have found refuge in the Jewish tradition, in our mamaloshen, Yiddish.For example, I have found modern and relevant ways to employ Yiddish aphorisms, like, “May all of CC Sabathia’s teeth fall our except for one, so he can be in pain.”Or “A-Rod should own a hundred houses with a hundred kitchens in each house, and the finest, most expensive foods, and be served breakfast fit for a king each morning in a different kitchen in a different house, prepared for him special by a hundred different chefs, and get into a different car, driven by a different driver who should drive him to a different doctor ... and not one should know why he chokes on every bite!"
In all seriousness, baseball has many similarities to religion.It is a largely communal experience with its own rituals, language, narrative myths, and of course, followers who are zealously committed to their team.Like religion, baseball has endless possibilities for obsessive behavior and over-intellectualization, which is why I can ask you the following question and some of you will know the answer: “What modern player has the most hits without ever appearing in a World Series?Answer: Rod Carew- with 3,053.Not intellectual enough?Try this one from Robert Cover’s baseball quiz coda to his book Narrative, Violence, and the Law: Which baseball player is most like the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.?
(a) Stan Musial
(b) Mickey Mantle
(c) Ty Cobb
(d) Casey Stengel
The correct answer is (d) Casey Stengel.Both Holmes and Stengel had enormously varied and long careers, in each case serving the game for 50 years.Despite great success in purely legal or baseball terms, each achieved immortality for his use of the English language.Both men put the game they loved in the perspective of the skeptic’s view of the eternal search for truth: “Logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind.But certainty is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man....”“So it’s possible a college education doesn’t always help you if you can’t hit a left handed changeup as far as the shortstop....”[1]
Baseball should not be dismissed as a silly game that grown men cannot seem to outgrow.That would be a gross underestimation of the passion it engenders.Because of this passion, it is strange to be the spiritual leader of a community in which so many people avidly hope for the precise opposite outcome of that which I desire to see.There is a gap between us, even if it is not over an issue we would call religiously or theologically substantial, it is substantial sociologically speaking.I am now the other.We are adversaries.So buried within all of this humor, what is it really like for me?Is there anything to be learned from this experience?
In today’s parsha, Abraham is told to go forth from his native land, from his father’s home, to an unknown land that God will show him.He is given the task of introducing God to the world, a world that until Abraham, only knew the gods of the sun and moon, of music and dancing, of animals, and so on.As soon as he leaves, he knows that he will encounter people who will feel threatened by his message, who will reject it, who may even wish him harm.This is always the story of belief which is why its twin brother is danger.
GO FORTH FROM YOUR NATIVE LAND, FROM YOUR BIRTHPLACE, AND FROM YOUR FATHER’S HOUSE TO THE LAND THAT I WILL SHOW YOU
Why didn’t God just say, “Go forth to this land that I will show you.”Why did God tell him that he had to leave the land in which he was born as well as his father’s house?Rabbi Lawrence Kushner offers the following answer, “The great, unending psychospiritual task of every human being is separating from his or her parents.Loved or hated, near or far, living or long dead, it’s never done.We spend our days trying to be who we imagine we want to be and not who they wanted us to be… [but] the text is clear: Doing business with the new, imageless, and yet unnamed God means to leave home, to commence the struggle…”[2]Abraham can’t bring God into the world, as it were, until he breaks free from what Kushner refers to as his psycho spiritual world, a world that was defined by his parents.He must inhabit a space of otherness in order for him to fulfill his task- he must be other from his parents, other from the polytheists he will meet along the way, and ultimately, other from himself, the person he had become all those years growing up in Ur.The experience of being the “other,” of being different from the people around us and the culture from which we came is a necessary step toward forging a new self.
So here I am, 12 Turnpike exits north of my Ur, my father’s home.In many ways, since I turned 18 years old, I have tried to remove my native land from who I am, from who I wanted to become.I had some successes doing this.At first, when I go back to South Jersey to visit, I feel like I have come home. All sorts of warm and loving memories and feelings return. It feels safe.But after about….five minutes(!), I feel largely “other,” different than the natives who reside in that seemingly foreign land.Kushner reminds us that even if we feel like strangers in our native land, we can not entirely remove our birthplace from the people we become, and for most of us, this creates moments in which we feel simultaneously at home and other.The same is true for our new homes.When, like Abraham, we leave our parents’ homes and travel into the unknown territories of our journey, we find that although we are strangers among the people we encounter, we begin to make some of their peculiar ways our own.Life is a continuous experience of coming home and being other at the same moment, which is confusing and lovely at the same time.I think this is the best way to answer the question I have been asked by so many people in the past week.What’s it like trying to meet the psycho spiritual needs of a community in which, for the next four days, I am largely your opponent?It’s disconcerting and beautiful at the same time.
It is disconcerting because even though it’s just a game, even though we are talking about baseball and not questions of morality and ethics, it’s still somewhat stunning and distressing to feel so out of sync with one’s community, or to put it another way, to be “other” in your own home.When I moved to New York City from Israel 12 years ago, I began to identify as a New Yorker, an identity which has become deeply important to me.I am at home here in New York more so than any other place in the world, except for Israel, of course.But for the past few weeks, I have been reminded that I am still “other,” even here at home.The Philadelphia / South Jersey stuff that I tried to leave on my parents’ porch when I left home at 18 is still inside of me. As Buzz Bissinger wrote in the New Republic yesterday, “The [Phillies have] the opportunity to become the first National League team to win back-to-back World Series since the Cincinnati Reds did it in 1975 and 1976. But finding comfort and peace in that, as most cities instantaneously would, is not so easy here. Philadelphians…actually enjoy wearing a chip on their shoulder. They like venting and feeling lousy and fatalistic, life a Sisyphean struggle.”This really resonated with me.This is why despite every desire I have to say otherwise, I just know the Yankees will win in 6… You can take the boy out of South Jersey, but you can’t take the pedestrian, middling, pessimism out of the boy.
Yes, being other from my community is disconcerting, but it can also be magnificent.In the middle of Game 1 of the World Series, my friend who is a die-hard Yankees fan texted me as the Phillies were winning.He called me a cheese-steak and then continued with a bunch of other words that can’t be repeated from the bimah.But when the game was over and Cliff Lee had pitched a gorgeous complete game with 10 strikeouts, the same friend texted me back and said, “That was really special to watch.”Even in our moments of being “other,” of wanting contradictory things, we are reminded that we appreciate most the art itself, an art whose beauty should always transcend the tribal impulses and loyalties that separate us.This truth is not limited to baseball.It is one of the most important lessons to apply to the way in which we live our lives.There are many differences between us, between our spouses and ourselves, between neighbors, family, and friends.But on a regular basis, we rise above them and engage one another around the principles that all human beings share: a desire for closeness, respect, and curiosity. This is the blessing of humanity, and we share this despite differences in race, religion, sexuality, and baseball loyalty. This is also the conclusion of our parsha.About Abraham, the quintessential “other” who lived among people as a foreigner, a strange tribesman with a radically new and untested idea, God says,
וְנִבְרְכוּ בְךָ כֹּל מִשְׁפְּחֹת הָאֲדָמָה
ALL THE FAMILIES OF THE EARTH SHALL BLESS THEMSELVES BY YOU
The universal is blessed by the particular. Regardless of which team wins (and may God let it be the Phillies), regardless of which team you want to wear the World Series ring, we are all united through the love of the most wonderful pastime since tohu vavohu, since Adam and Eve, since the invention of Shabbat and the creation of the universe: the great game of baseball.We’ll end with a traditional Shabbat custom: making a bet.If the Phillies win it all, next week I will buy soft pretzels for everyone at the kiddush if you agree to provide knishes should the Yankees win (y’mach sh’mam spit, spit, spit).May the underdog win!Shabbat Shalom.
[1]Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The essays of Robert Cover, Ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, p. 251.
[2]Five Cities of Refuge, Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet. p 11.
The sadness of this day burrows deep into the pits of our soul, but the confidence that we know how to commemorate it runs thin. Some pundits and politicians justify the choice to "go on with life" with naïve projections:
"The victims of this horrific act would have wanted us to go on with our lives."
"We can't shut our country down for the day because then the terrorists win."
Really? I'm not so sure we know what the victims would have wanted from us, and it seems odd to suggest that "business as usual" hands a swift defeat to terrorists. What I am sure about is that on this day we experienced a horror so extreme that eight years later, its ripple effects continue to tear families apart and further rupture already broken hearts. If we have learned anything from our ancestors, people whose lives were always squeezed between bookends of violence and hostility, it's that remembering matters. The way we remember a loved one is in community, together with other people, people who by virtue of being human, have also encountered the searing pain of loss. We are not permitted to recite the words of the Mourner's Kaddish unless we can be embraced by at least nine other people immediately after our prayer books are closed. Remembering does matter; how we remember matters too.
As the sun starts to fade on this difficult day and we trickle home from work, take some time to be in a state of togetherness as an act of remembering. Reflect, perhaps by yourself, but then share a Shabbat meal with family and friends; invite neighbors over for tea and conversation; or come to synagogue to be with your community. No fancy speeches. No resolutions. No political pledges. Just human beings engaged in the most dignified human act: honoring the pain that still reverberates through our world on this day, while being grateful for the blessings that we do have. Together with other people, we will have the strength to sit in the silence triggered by our sadness, as well as the privilege of singing the song reflective of our hope for the future.
i am a rabbi, despite formidable attempts to end up anywhere BUT the rabbinate. one could say i have an un-calling, to wit, i took the circuitous path through tarshish. this blog is an attempt to gather note-worthy reflection and ideas from friends, congregants, teachers, and anyone else who has has something thoughtful to say, and they will be shared "via the rabbi." some posts are geared toward congregants; others are aimed at anyone who thinks.
