Congregation Beth El

I’m part of a fellowship called Rabbis Without Borders that meets four times a year in New York City. The theme of our conference this December was technology and the rabbinate. Self-described Ludite that I am, I felt challenged by the material, which consisted partly of learning about making better use of social media in our rabbinates, and partly of exploring the larger questions technology challenges us with in general. But I attempted to stay open and receptive during the conference, and to evaluate what came up on its own terms rather than trot out my normal defenses and rebukes.

For some reason, it’s part of my story to resist technology. I held out and didn’t get a cd player until the late 1990s, playing my cassettes proudly, when others were beginning to go digital. In fact, one of my fears about joining Facebook is that I’ve held out this long. Knowing my luck, the second I join, the whole thing will become obsolete, and I reason that I don’t want to be responsible for the demise of Facebook. I wonder why this has been such a part of how I’ve wanted to define myself; after all, I don’t want to resist for resistance’s sake. Nor do I aspire to sentimentality, or want to dwell in the past, or become irrelevant. And yet I often feel like the Grumpy Old Man from the old Saturday Night Live skits, who would howl, after describing some awful custom from decades ago: “That’s the way it was and we liked it that way!”

Of course, one can point out that I’m resisting technology only in minor, symbolic ways. Whether I (or anyone else) like it or not, our new technology makes most of our lives possible. These changes are inevitable. For most people under 30, the digital age is unconscious second nature, it is just how it is. It was pointed out to me during this recent weekend that we had the same debates not only about television, but also about eyeglasses in the 14th century (it was no accident that Spinoza was a lens-grinder!), or the printing press in the 15th! We carry on when any new invention threatens our way of life. We say, oh, things will never be the same again! In some ways, we are like scribes complaining because they were no longer needed after the printing press was invented.

But I know part of my resistance is through my direct experience. I find most technology makes it harder and harder to be present in my life, to move slowly, to notice things. It’s hard enough to be present. We human beings are aversive creatures anyway – we start out trying to escape pain and we keep going from there till we are constantly jumpy and ready to distract from whatever is happening.

Daniel Sieradski, who is an activist and expert on social media, gave two presentations at our conference: one detailing the amazing role social media played in fueling and making possible the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement; the other sharing the next steps coming down the pike in this digital revolution – a talk he called transhumanism. I found the first presentation inspiring and the second terrifying. Can one can pick and choose with this new technology or if we are being swept away in an inevitable shift in how we live and who we are? Is resistance futile, as aliens have said in sci-fi films, or is there an opportunity for a counter-cultural push back – if so, what would that look like? What would it serve?

My stepfather pointed out to me recently that the old thing we used to do between moments was have a cigarette. While we now are well aware of the dangers of this habit, at least when one smoked they were looking outward with their eyes, tilted in a way that they could receive the world, rather than hunched over and closed off, which is the physical posture of our moment-passing now, as we text, tweet and play games on our little devices. Rabbi Daniel Kramer once posited that the effect the cell phone is having is that it is making it so we feel like we never have to be alone anymore.

And yet, and yet. I’m told that all my posturing doesn’t really matter anyway because it is how the world is. So slowly, I try to open my mind. I got a smartphone last month. I skype, I facetime, I text. I still am holding out against Facebook and Twitter, but to what end? For how long? As part of an exercise at the conference, they asked us to write a sample tweet (which has to be 140 characters or less). I wrote: “I wish I was actually with you.”

Perhaps we can find a way to at least weigh the options when a new technology is introduced rather than just use it because we can. Apparently the Amish would have a community process and weigh the pros and cons of each new technology. For instance, when the telephone came out, they debated and debated and finally voted to install them in their workshops, as that would assist in business, but not in their homes, as it would interrupt family time. They made technology a conscious choice, not some force that was foisted on them without a peep of resistance. At least we can learn to name what is lost, and what the cost might be, even as we change with the times.

The name ‘Black Friday’ has always sounded to me like the commemoration of a massacre, as opposed to what has become a kind of pseudo national holiday. The way the calendar is structured, an alien new to this planet would think Americans give thanks on Thursday for the unencumbered right to shop on Friday.

This is a time where our collective life seems to be at a particularly low ebb: Congress has its lowest approval ratings ever, the lack of ability to compromise or engage in respectful discourse with people we don’t agree with is staggering, and corporations have been ruled to have the same rights as individual human beings. In the midst of this, what made the most headlines last week leading up to Thanksgiving were the Black Friday sales. One looks around these days at what seems to get us excited and wants to ask – is this what we have been given freedom for? The freedom to shop, to pursue wealth and property, to have a system of private enterprise and an unfettered free-market? We could ask this question not just concerning political freedom, that granted us by our Constitution, but also concerning the freedom each of us was born with by virtue of our being a human being with a body and a soul. How are we exercising our freedoms? Do we see freedom as a means or an end?

It should be said that Black Friday gets unfairly singled out and beat up in this way often. I don’t mean to pick on shopping, or on those of us who took advantage of great sales (I purchased a new iPhone myself). Besides stimulating the economy and supporting our businesses, there is no crime in getting a jump on Hanukah/Christmas gifts. But Roger Waters was prescient twenty years ago when he penned “Amused to death.”

“This species has amused itself to death / We watched the tragedy unfold /
We did as we were told / We bought and sold / It was the greatest show on earth / But then it was over.”

Back when Waters wrote that song in the early 1990s, however, we were just getting warmed up. One has the sense that our energy is getting misspent. We go to great lengths to exercise individual liberty with our shopping, while we resent the collective demands our country makes on us (like taxation, or in another sense, volunteer service work) to serve the goal of cultivating a society that reflects our core values and shores up our core institutions.

Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, offered remarks at this past year’s commencement that I thought were as direct and challenging as I’ve read recently. He wrote, “Our freedoms will not be taken from us by tyranny. We are letting them atrophy through disuse and negligence. We permit our freedoms, our political rights, to be stripped of any potent content…We will flourish as free individuals only to the extent that the shared space we inhabit – in terms of the health of the world we live in and the health of the human community – renders liberty possible.”

Freedom is not an end. It is a means whereby we can be of service to one another. Freedom is the starting point. It is not a static state. It makes possible our collective lives as human beings. It allows us to love each other, to move towards the other. And it is up to us to respond to what freedom demands of us, which I would say is inseparable from what G-d demands of us.

As Thanksgiving weekend passes each year, we all strive to be in touch with what are we grateful for. I am grateful to live in a community, here in Bennington, where I feel people do take this to heart, where we have a network of faith communities and other communities taking this call to serve seriously. It is nothing less than a call to open the heart. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take advantage of a good sale here or there. What it means is that we shouldn’t be too distracted by our consumerist society so that we forget what real freedom asks of us.

For a long time now, I have been reading poetry, but most poems I read
I cannot understand. Even when I do believe that I understand, they
often fail to move me. My friend Michael has said that of one hundred
poems he might come across, ninety-nine of them would be lost on him.
But, he says, it is worth slogging through those ninety-nine for the
power and immediacy he feels reading the hundredth one, the kind of
poem that changes your life, that gives words to something that
previously had only existed inside you as a feeling or sensation.
Poetry comes closest to expressing the unexpressable. For that reason,
I think of poetry as religious language.

Much has been written about the difference between poetry and prose.
The best distinction that I’ve heard between the two is that prose is
binary – it can only hold one truth, while poetry can hold many
seemingly contradictory truths.

To me, the Bible is poetry. How else could you explain the many ways
that we read it, the different faces it will turn up to us as we read
and re-read it at different junctures in our lives? Of course a sacred
text would be multi-vocal instead of uni-vocal. A teacher of mine said
one should read the Bible from the vantage point of all the
characters, including not only Moses or Abraham, but also Pharaoh. G-d
is too vast to fit into one view or one idea. And so, to me the Bible
must be the language of poetry.

Just like we enjoy the old Westerns because of the clear distinction
between the good guys and bad guys, we often wish the Bible were
prose, containing one truth, one way of seeing. The world of prose is
a relief because there are clear lines and distinctions between
things.

To give a current example of what poetry can describe that prose
cannot is to ask ourselves which season is it now in Southern Vermont
in late August. Is it the beginning of fall? The end of summer? What
is the difference between late summer and early fall? Which one is it
– summer or fall – we want to know. Of course, it is both, or soon
will be. There is no clear line demarcating between the two. Prose
can’t really get at this. But poetry can express this feeling of the
air being just a little different each morning and each evening, and
for the longing that can overtake us this time of year. Witness the
words of the poet Jack Gilbert: “Love lasts by not lasting.” Or Yves
Bonnefoy, “And again: summer will last / No more than an hour. / But
let our hour be / Vast as the river.” We hear these words that don’t
describe the season exactly, but somehow describe our feeling in the
presence of the season’s change.

In this world, we often write in prose, because we live in prose. We
are trained to see our experiences as good or bad. So, there are two
blessings in Judaism – one to recite upon hearing bad news and one to
recite upon hearing good news. We have two separate blessings because
of the prose world we live in and our conditioned seeing that is a
result of this. It is taught that in the time to come, we will realize
there is only one blessing for good or bad news, since it all comes
from one source. The words of our traditions tell us this also. If we
listen closely, we can hear the hidden poetry inside the words of
prose, like in this line from the morning prayers, “Who can resemble
You, the source of life and death, who makes salvation grow?” Prayer
is in the language of poetry.

So we read through the poetry—and the prayers—that we often don’t
understand for the one that comes along every so often, for the one
that gives a name to this hinge season, for the one that gives a name
to this ancient emotion buried in our chest. Like this poem-prayer
from Leonard Cohen: “The road is too long / the sky is too vast / the
wandering heart / is homeless at last.”

Often we are made to believe that human rights and national safety or security are mutually exclusive ends; that is, if we enjoy one, it is at the expense of the other. This is not a new dichotomy - one example is the internment of Japanese-Americans in this country during World War II, in the name of security.

In the years after 9/11, we’ve heard versions of this debate many times; most recently this month, with Representative Peter King’s hearings on the radicalization of Muslim American communities. Proponents say the hearings are necessary to fight homegrown terrorism. Detractors liken them to a McCarthy-esque witch hunt, which the say is un-American in its targeting of a particular religious group. While no one would argue that we should not be concerned with extremist violence, are hearings like this the way to go about fighting it?

In the name of security, we tend to do the damndest things. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Of course, it is rarely as pat and clear as Franklin makes it out to be. Figuring out the relationship between liberty and safety is difficult work – and what is more primary in human consciousness than keeping ourselves, our loved ones, our countrymen, safe? Sometimes real issues of national security mean taking extraordinary measures. But doing so places us on a slippery slope – and history tells us it is not good policy.

Many religious groups and civil rights organizations have been vocal in their opposition to King’s hearings. But it is not just religious ethics that they’re leaning on, it is the practical implications: these policies don’t have a tendency to actually make us safer. When we make an entire religious community the target of suspicion and distrust, it just serves to breed more animosity and a sense of not-belonging within that isolated community. When they are reached out to and engaged—they, like many minority communities before them, tend to become valuable members of the societal and national fabric, and in this case, allies in the fight against terror. A Duke University study recently concluded that 40% of domestic terror plots in recent years in this country have been thwarted by concerned Muslims. When we actually put our American values into practice, we are made safer by our choosing unity in diversity as opposed to fear and division. The hearings—which King refused to broaden—distract us from more targeted searches for actual terrorists.

The Jewish people are familiar with being singled out and scape-goated by their adopted countries. We know what it is like to be made a target. It is in our ancient historical experience as slaves in Egypt, it is in our recent historical experience with the mass destruction of the Jewish community in Europe, and it is in our sacred texts to be conscious of the stranger because we know “the heart of the stranger,” as the Torah says.

National Jewish Democratic Council President David Harris puts it bluntly, calling King’s hearings “truly detrimental—detrimental because they target and single out one community, solely based on its religious affiliation. American Jews—and all Americans concerned about the rights of religious minorities, upon which this country was founded—should be deeply troubled about the chilling effect calling out Muslims through a congressional hearing can and will have on religious tolerance. Fighting terrorism and protecting our homeland are profoundly important issues…but this can be done in ways that do not imply the vilification of an entire religious community.”

The holiday of Purim, which we marked last week, revolves around the Book of Esther – which tells the story of the Jewish people being singled out as a community. Haman, the evil minister of the King, is furious when a Jewish man, Mordechai, refuses to bow down to him, and in response, seeks to wipe out Mordechai’s entire people. Rabbi Jill Jacob points out that the argument Haman makes for this when going to the King is striking. In the Book of Esther, Haman argues, “There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8). Rabbi Jacobs writes, “The pattern is a familiar one: one or more members of the Jewish community (or another ethnic or religious community) anger a powerful figure or join a radical movement, and the whole community comes under suspicion. The result is an explosion in anti-Semitic (or anti-ethnic) feelings and behavior, and even expulsion or murder.”

We have an American tradition of tolerance and a belief in unity irrespective of racial, religious, and ethnic identities. There have been eloquent voices among Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious leaders that have criticized Representative King’s hearings. At the heart of these critiques, I think rightly, is the conviction that ultimately human rights and national security are not only compatible, they ensure the other’s existence.

This week, I watched Ken Burn’s film The Tenth Inning, which is a postscript/sequel to his excellent nine-installment Baseball film of the last decade. Burns succeeds in not only narrating the storylines on the field that gripped baseball in the past decade, but in unflinchingly dealing with the off the field matters, like the 1994 strike and the steroid cloud that hangs over baseball still. And of course you cannot really separate on field from off field in baseball – that’s one of its enduring strengths. In fact, Burns may be the first to provide a coherent narrative structure to this recent era. He gives us epic characters that he builds the story around. Home run king, chronic malcontent, demon-wrestler, lightning rod for criticism: Barry Bonds is not coddled nor is he vilified in Burn’s able hands. Instead, Bonds comes off as a tragic figure that we can’t help but empathize with by the end of the film. Even for me, a lifetime Yankees fan, I could (almost) feel enough distance in Burns’ telling to appreciate the Red Sox’s reversing the curse in 2004. Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine, Cal Ripken, McGwire-Sosa, and even Steve Bartman are woven into the fabric of this past decade and a half that reminds us of why we love the game and how it rips our heart out over and over again. My wife, Vanessa, did not know the story of Bartman, the Cubs fan whose interference while trying to catch a foul ball may have cost the long-suffering Cubs fans a shot at a title in 2003, and she couldn’t believe the cruelty the game seems to induce and create. We routinely follow baseball into places of great darkness or unspeakable relief. A theological question might be: does the game create even more cruelty and despondency (as well as joy and redemption) in life – or does it provide a healthy outlet to those existing emotions that are always present but tough to access sometimes?

Baseball is the only sport where sportswriters can quote Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Whitman, and not sound pretentious. It’s a literary game. While a casual observer might groan about its slow pace, for an aficionado, it’s watching the great drama of human life unfold. It’s also an American game – something we can take pride in importing to the rest of the world more than Rambo films and (ahem) democracy. Baseball is America at its imperfect, beautiful best. We understand, as Whitman wrote, that baseball is “our game…it fits into the American atmosphere as significantly as our Constitution’s laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

And of course this upcoming postseason hold many open questions and possible plotlines: Can the once proud franchises in Cincinnati and San Francisco make a deep run in the playoffs? Can anyone compete with the Phillies pitching? And most importantly, will Derek Jeter recover his erstwhile October magic and will the Yankees overcome a rough September to once again capture the crown?

Why is this a Speaking of Religion column? Any baseball fan knows that following his or her sport is essentially a spiritual practice. There’s a daily engagement with it - checking the box scores each day (not just once a week). There’s a rich history of fans (and players) experimenting with all kinds of superstitious practice to ensure favorable outcomes. Many fans feel a bond with past generations who loved the game. My grandfather Hyde was a Red Sox fan. When I was little and we lived in the Berkshires pre-internet, after Red Sox-Yankees games that we couldn’t watch, he used to call anyone he could in town to find out the score of the game. When the Gazette’s sports desk was closed, he even took to calling the fire station, to which he received a stern reprimand for tying up the phone lines. How many people feel they are in sacred space when they are in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium more than they have ever felt in a church or synagogue?

Each High Holiday season, we at Congregation Beth El read Bart Giamatti’s words as part of our supplemental readings. It has been noted that our community can deal with Democrat-Republican tensions in the pews, but that the third rail, never to be talked about, is Red Sox-Yankees politics. I find Giamatti captures the quicksilver the game brings us, and is able to come closest to naming baseball’s ineffable connection to the seasons of our heart:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

“It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

“Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who are born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to the more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”

There’s a Jewish tradition of dedicating learning to someone. In that spirit, as we begin to learn this evening, I’d like to dedicate this talk and our gathering to Rabbi David Novak, and his continued healing.

The rabbis used to ask: what is more important, torah study or action? Torah study, because it leads to action. The prayer is that in learning, in exchanging words of Torah in the broadest sense, that we orient ourselves and find a spark that will compel us to be active, to embody what we learn. And in the Jewish tradition, we learn with another, with others. In a way, the medium is the message – when we sit down together to learn, we enter relationship. And when we enter relationship authentically, this leads to healing and clarity and action. So, in the Jewish imagination, it is never just words.

Every year in January, when we are marking the birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Jewish torah-reading cycle, we also find ourselves within the narrative of Exodus. Fittingly, Dr. King was born as synagogues everywhere were reading about Moses beginning to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. And these twin messages of the journey to freedom are often recounted, compared, and analyzed in this season. I want to find our way into this conversation by beginning somewhere else, however – with the release of Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album in 1979.

This was Dylan’s first album since becoming a born-again Christian. Most of the chatter then and even now when people recount the album and this period in Dylan’s life centers around the experience of his conversion – is he Christian, is he Jewish, etc. But I think overlooked in that is probably an even more controversial stand that Dylan, who has always gone against the grain, took. That is - the last thing fans of his wanted to hear or imagined hearing in the late 70s, which probably had the worst of the 70s and the 80s combined into one year – the age of excess meets the beginning of the ‘me’ decade, was the best-known single on the album, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” There was resistance from the fanbase: what do you mean, gotta serve somebody? Forget that – we want freedom to do whatever we want, we don’t have to serve any authority figure. Why don’t you go back to singing songs like ‘the times they are a changin’? John Lennon, supposedly in response, wrote a song called: “Serve Yourself.” Whatever one thinks about this period in Dylan’s recording life (and personally, I think it is an overlooked period that some great gospel music came out of), something about this song, at least, has stuck. Blues artists continue to cover it and it remains well-known, while other lesser songs on the album like “Man gave names to all the animals” have kind of fallen by the wayside.

What’s Dylan saying in this song? Like any piece of Torah, there are multiple levels and interpretations, but I would say at the heart of this song – “It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you know you gotta serve somebody” - we find Dr. King and the story of Exodus. We find the message to serve. Freedom does not exist for its own sake. The story of the Exodus plays this out. We all remember, “Let my people go,” Shlach Ami, and we forget the second half of the verse, “in order that they may serve me,” v’ya’avduni. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is a state by which we can learn to serve and to be of service – consciously, and without coercion. Gd isn’t saying let my people go in order that they have endless choices of ringtones, and Subway sandwich options. Gd is saying, let my people go so that they can serve me instead of Pharoah. So that they can be of deeper, more conscious, more holy service.

The story of the Exodus in a nutshell involves three parts. First, it begins with the reality of the condition of slavery, with the people being forced to serve a false master. The middle piece involves the people being liberated from that condition and given a choice in the matter. And the story continues with the third part, the part all of us are still enmeshed with today, the going out of Egypt, the long journey in the desert towards learning and coming to know what it is we are ready to commit to serving.

What does it mean to serve Gd? For many of us, that is a phrase that we’re not necessarily comfortable with. But let’s translate it. Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says we no longer can employ the vertical metaphor, Gd as outside us and above us, a transcendent external commanding force. Rabbi Schechter-Shalomi says, in fact, that the whole idea of an external commander does not make sense anymore. Instead, we find an inside model: Serve what most presses upon you from your inner core, the locus of divinity that you find when you go down to your deepest, truest place. Learn how to listen to that voice, and trust that voice. When we are in correct relationship to that voice, we intuitively know that we need to serve others. Serving others means being in relationship to suffering – both our own and other people’s. When we are in relationship to this sort of listening, we know that our life, whatever we spend our life doing, will be a life in service of others and in service of something greater.

What Dylan is saying is that we are always in the act of serving. If we don’t choose, it is still a choice be default. Reb Shmuel Simenowitz has taught that we are all born under a particular mazal, a star/planet, that gives us a gift that we have when we come into the world. To use an extreme example, the shochet is born under the same mazal as the murderer. The gift is a gift – but we can choose where we turn with that gift, who or what it serves. We all have a relationship to call, to some measure of understanding that we were put here to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Obviously, we know Dr. King was a religious man. But we secularize his message sometimes, which I think blunts it. He was a Christian, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers. He got into this work because of Gd. We can look at other human rights movements and other visionaries, indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history like Dr. King, and see people who were motivated by their faith, and see the role religion has played – and can play - in who we are as a nation and a world. Our faith teaches us that we gotta serve somebody.

I want to read an excerpt from Dr. King’s famous letter from a Birmingham jail.
“But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love; was not Amos an extremist for justice; was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel; was not Martin Luther an extremist; and John Bunyan; and Abraham Lincoln; and Thomas Jefferson? So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

Dr. King is saying this is how we serve Gd: by being a creative extremist for love and justice.

I think we in the Jewish tradition have coasted too long on that iconic image of Dr. King marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. We point at that proudly and talk about our ongoing pursuit of justice, and being true to the words of Dr. King. And Lord knows there were many courageous rabbis and Jews (as well as religious clergy and lay leaders of all different faiths) who took up his call and took those stands. But we must ask ourselves: what would it look like, what would it feel like – today – to be a creative extremist for love?

There’s an old story of a rabbi who was heckled by a man standing in the back of the synagogue, interrupting his sermons by yelling, “Whom do you serve?” Instead of having the man arrested, or at the very least, kicked out, or silenced somehow, the rabbi hired him to follow him around repeating his question: “whom do you serve?” all day long.
Dr. King also knew what is repeated in this week’s portion, too: Lo neda ma na’avod et adonai ad boeynu shama. We will not know how to worship the Lord until we arrive there. Dr. King asks us to really listen to where we are right now, today, and how we can authentically serve from that place, in a way that reflects the longings of our deepest selves.

May we heed Dylan’s call to serve, to be conscious and aware of what we are truly in service of; may we heed Dr. King’s call to be a creative extremist for love; and may we see ourselves still in that third part of the Exodus narrative, going out of Egypt, learning how we can commit and how best we can serve.

This winter season, fans of the 67 year old ‘original American Idol’, Bob Dylan, are being treated to a new Dylan album unlike any that has come before: a Christmas album. This news is being heralded as stunning and bizarre by Jewish and Christian Dylan fans alike, who despite their differences in religion, are united in their confusion about this recent album from the old poet/prophet. Some loved it, some hated it. Reviews range from “mind-crunchingly wrong” to “brilliant” to “downright weird.”

Dylan, who is Jewish but had a high-profile born-again Christian phase in the 1980s, has always been sly and evasive about his religious leanings, and has succeeded in cultivating a mystery around his spirituality of choice (as well as around pretty much everything else). After the album came out, when a British paper asked him about his current faith, he replied only, “I am a true believer” (one can imagine him winking as he said it).

The thing is that, upon actually listening to the album, one hears a lot of joy in it. Dylan is clearly having fun, celebrating the genre, and at the same time saying, perhaps, to not take ourselves, or our differences, too seriously this holiday season.

I think of Dylan when I hear the wonderful story about Jews and Christians arguing about who the messiah is: the Jews are insisting that the messiah has never come, and the Christians are insisting that he has come once before. When the messiah finally arrives, both groups crowd around and shout, alternatingly, “Isn’t it true that you’ve never come before?” and “You’ve been here once before already, right?” The messiah responds softly, “My friends I have been here many, many times, but you have been so busy arguing with one another that you have not noticed.”

Tellingly, Dylan called the Christmas songs he heard growing up in Minnesota, “folk songs.” For many Jews in America, Christmas songs are folk songs. In our family, I grew up with Mitch Miller’s Christmas album “Sing Along with Mitch” on the stereo (he was also Jewish, by the way). Even as my family lit the hannukiah and celebrated eight nights of Hanukkah, “Sing Along with Mitch” reminded me that I was also part of a larger fabric. The songs comforted me somehow. As a parallel, I’m sure many Christian kids connect to Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs, which celebrate religious freedom and courage in the face of intolerance, both themes of Hanukkah. Indeed, we draw from each other’s wells. It is one of the gifts of living in this country.

At the end of the video for “Must be Santa”, Dylan and Santa Claus (the Jewish troubadour and old Saint Nick himself) stand outside on the porch of a home that is having a raucous Christmas party and give each other a look that almost says, “Hey, you’re alright.”

In the end, Dylan succeeds in keeping the mystery of his faith intact, while proving, as one reviewer put it, that “his roots are everywhere.” On a song recorded a few years ago, he sings, “I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned / ain’t no alters on this long and winding road.” Jewish or Christian, Dylan is clearly winking at us.

We have a built-in sensitivity to place. The secular and religious alike among us seek out sacred places: places with historic significance, places of natural beauty and awe, places where we feel a ‘charge’ of some sort. Mircea Eliade famously said that such sites serve as an axis between sky and earth. When we are in these places, we experience what we might call revelation - in that something is revealed. We are affected. Jacob woke up from his dream of the ladder and said, “God was in this place, and I, I did not know.”

In a few weeks, we will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates the seminal moment of revelation in Judaism – the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. It is not surprising that the site for this revelation is a mountain, which literally occupies that rare air between heaven and earth, and requires effort to climb and endure. The revelation stories in many cultures take place on mountains. In our specific example in Exodus, thunder and lightning fill the sky; there is smoke, fire, and trembling. The people take their places at the foot of the mountain and prepare to receive best they can. A major distinction in Judaism is that the moment of revelation, which in most traditions is given to a particular prophet who then relays it to the people, is something that the entire people share at Sinai. Granted, the people cannot endure this axis moment for long, and need to retreat – but the attempt is there.

For some of us, the mountaineers among us perhaps, the mountain is the most intuitive setting for this kind of holy encounter. I’m not someone who climbs a lot of mountains (or even does well with heights), but years ago, when I climbed the mountain in the Sinai peninsula known by the Bedouin as Jabal Musa (the mountain of Moses), I knew that even if this spot may not have been the actual mountain, it was clearly a place to go to get down to brass tacks with G-d. We watched the purple sunrise over Saudi Arabia after hiking all night to the summit, and the revelation was wordless and profound.

Yet I wonder about the mountain when I compare it to other axis sites, particularly labyrinths. A labyrinth is a sort of maze – but one in which there is only one path that winds and branches and leads to a center. It appears in the stories of many cultures, particularly in Greek mythology. Judaism does not have much evidence of physical labyrinths, though it was said that when a pilgrim in the middle ages couldn’t afford to go to Jerusalem, he or she would walk a labyrinth to simulate the experience of being in the holy city. Prayer has often been described as entering into a labyrinth of the spirit.

I am drawn to this model because it is not a model of G-d ‘up there,’ but instead a model where we find G-d by tunneling within. Early on, as children in this culture, we learn to locate G-d above. Art Green has written that it may be time for a new metaphor. “Let us think of the journey to G-d as a journey inward, where the goal is an ultimately deep level within the self rather than the top of a mountain,” he writes, “Spiritual growth, in this metaphor, is a matter of uncovering new depths rather than attaining new heights. Perhaps we could even try to think of Torah itself as having been given at the deepest level of inner encounter, rather than from the top of the highest mountain, the mountain serving as a vertical metaphor for an inward event.”

Maybe we also don’t have to work as hard to climb, at least in the ‘up by the bootstraps’ sense, to reach this axis. Scott Carrino, who teaches Tai Ji in Cambridge, New York, often instructs his students who are in the midst of movement to ask themselves “how could this be easier?” I always love this instruction, as I usually am striving or forcing something. Sometimes revelation comes when we stop trying so hard.

The labyrinth teaches us that the path to revelation is itself revelation. Each place is potentially an axis mundi. Jacob’s story of the ladder teaches us that we never know when we will stumble upon such a place. The Mount Sinai moment – that we get ready to commemorate on Shavuot – teaches us that whether we climb up or in, we have to keep searching for a language of shared revelation. It is said that every person at the foot of Mount Sinai heard something different, and that every testimony was necessary.

It’s probably a safe bet to say that most of us take ourselves too seriously, and that our religious communities don’t help us in this regard too much. After all, stakes are high in this world of ours. We hold tightly to our identities and affiliations because we need ways to navigate a life that can be, at times, brutal and indifferent. All spiritual traditions agree that life brings us suffering. We see fascinating differences in our traditions however, by how we respond to this suffering: how we face it, how we make meaning of it. It is said that while there are many ways to G-d, the most tried and true of these come when we suffer, when we are wounded – because they can awaken us by reminding us powerfully of our mortality, our limited time, and the gift that life is. I think this is true. What are the other ways, though? Do we spend enough time learning these routes to G-d? As hard as it is to come to terms with pain and the wounds that each of us carry, in some respects, it can be even harder to come to terms with joy, to learn to trust joy, to find a spiritual path through joy.

In regards to taking ourselves too seriously, Judaism is no different than the rest. But there is one exception to this, a holiday that comes once a year and pulls the carpet out from underneath our serious posturing, and that is Purim. On Purim, we read the beguiling story of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Esther is a strange choice to be included in the canon, as not only does it read more as a Brothers Grimm tale, complete with heroes (Mordechai) and villains (Haman), but it is full of sexual innuendo, and G-d’s name doesn’t appear once in the story – one of only two books in the Bible where this is the case! To add to this craziness, it is customary on Purim to dress up in costume, and to celebrate so much that one does not know the difference anymore between Mordechai and Haman! What is going on here? Judaism, like any religion, is built by defining clear boundaries, and giving clear instruction as to proper behavior. G-d is supposed to be central in this work. How could there by a holiday where there is no G-d, where good and evil seem interchangeable, and everything is topsy-turvy? Put differently, it is amazing that there would be a holiday that seems to undermine the entire tradition that is built into the tradition itself.

Perhaps G-d is absent in the story because G-d appears to be absent much of the time in our lives, at least in dramatic, peak-experience type ways. It is up to us to find G-d hidden in the world, in places where we might least expect to look. Actually, Purim teaches, holiness is everywhere, but it is our task as humans to manifest it through righteous and just acts. The Hasidic commentator the Sfat Emet writes that what Purim is trying to teach when it says you shouldn’t know the difference between Haman and Mordechai, is that one can learn to see the divine presence in all things. Normally, he writes, we come to do the work of repentance through suffering and affliction, but on Purim we do this work through joy. Another commentator, the Aish Kodesh, takes it one step further: “The simcha (joy) of Purim is required: not only if a person is naturally in simcha or is in a situation where it is possible for him to rejoice, but rather, he has to be happy! Even if he is feeling wretched and broken hearted, his mind and spirit trampled, it is required of him to find even a little spark of simcha to bring into his heart.” The Aish Kodesh was the rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto, so these are not idle words.

What does this mean? Is it possible or desirable to force yourself to be happy? Purim brings us this challenge. Perhaps we are not being asked to force happiness where it doesn’t fit; rather, we are being forcibly reminded that joy can be as transformative as pain, that joy can be a path towards truth and holiness, and indeed, must be. Perhaps we are being reminded that in the absence of a felt presence of G-d, that we are called to uncover this presence, to find G-d in hiding, through living lives that bring holiness to the least likely places.

In the end, Purim turns out to be as serious as it gets.

We are here as a community – different faiths, different backgrounds – to celebrate the launching of what I think is a monumental achievement for Bennington – the birth of a free medical clinic – where those adults in our community who need health care but don’t have the means to receive health care – can come here to First Baptist on Thursday evenings and actually receive health care. This is a case of the people taking matters into their own hands and saying, you know, a civilized nation is a nation where health care is thought of as a human right. Let’s make this a civilized nation, or in our case, let’s try to make this a civilized corner of southwestern Vermont. In the midst of an extraordinarily difficult time, with economic recession, layoffs, when many of us are suffering in a variety of ways – in the midst of such a time we have had a successful and unprecedented year raising money for the Food and Fuel Fund, and now we are opening this free clinic. Our community should be proud of itself. This is what community is about, this is what community action is about. Of course, the opening is literally the beginning – the work is literally just beginning, but we should stop and celebrate the work that went into making this happen.

First and foremost I think we should thank two people whose vision and tireless work have translated directly into the opening of the clinic: Dr. Richard Dundas, and our Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Sue Andrews. The other person who has guided us to this point and who deserves our great thanks is Reverend Jerrod Hugenot – and – First Baptist Church, their Board of Trustees, and their entire congregation, for their decision to open the doors of their facility to community initiatives like this one. It is much easier to say, well, that would be complicated, or, let them put the clinic somewhere else, etc. We should thank the entire Interfaith Council of Bennington, whose month in and month out practices faith-based community organizing. And in that spirit, we should extend our gratitude in the direction of Greensboro, North Carolina to Rabbi Howard Cohen, whose 13 years of work on behalf of the Council and of the community, among other things, paved the way for tonight’s opening.
We want to thank VCCU (Vermont Coalition of Clinics of the Uninsured), VIM (Volunteers in Medicine). Also, thanks to the following foundations for their substantial contributions: the Stratton Foundation, the Vermont Community Foundation, Merchants Bank Community Foundation and the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation.

In Judaism we celebrate and remember someone’s life on the occasion of the anniversary of their death, their yahrzeit.
Today is the yahrzeit of the great rabbi, teacher, and civil rights activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Among other things, Heschel used to say, “A human is a messenger who forgot the message.” It’s a great definition for what a human is. And of course it raises the question: what is the message? How do we remember the message? In our tradition, when we have a question such as this, we try to say, well, there might be a clue in the weekly Torah portion. Maybe.

This is the week we read the account of Moses and the burning bush. It’s an arresting image: Moses stopped still in front of a bush that is on fire, but is not being burnt up. Someone would have to stop for a while to notice that, right? You would actually have to wait to see that the bush wasn’t being destroyed. There’s a teaching that actually, the bush is always burning, it just takes someone special like Moses to turn aside and see it. In a similar vein, our neighbor, the other next to us, is always in need – we are just not always able to turn and see. We are not always able to ask the question that Moses does, how is it that this is happening? And then to find the sense of personal call in relationship to the experience: what can I do? This is what Sue Andrews and Dick Dundas and First Baptist and the Interfaith Council and all of you have done. This is a burning bush moment. Stopping to notice the needs of our neighbors, to ask why those needs exist, and to feel personally called to respond.

Grant Schnerr asks, why a burning bush – why that particular symbolism? What is it that burns but does not destroy? He answers, love. Love – is that which burns but does not consume. Love is that which burns but does not destroy.

So maybe this is the message that we have forgotten and that occasionally we remember: look, love, burn with justice. Rabbi Israel Salanter says we must remember that the other’s physical needs are our spiritual needs.

So may we continue to stop and notice, may we continue to feel the miracle of our interconnection, may we continue to be moved to action. Thank you.