This was my Yom Kippur morning sermon for 5780 (2019). As I generally do, I was jumping off from the spirit of the Haftarah of that day, which is mostly from Isaiah 58, and I conclude quoting the end of those prophetic words.
One evening last fall I sat in the auditorium at Nashua High School North, for an induction ceremony that my daughter Lela was part of. On stage was such a tableau of students – white and African-American, Indian-American and Latino-American, Asian-America and of course my own Jewish-American. One of the roles in the ceremony was for a city official, to say the usual words and deliver some charge about service and responsibility. It struck me that the official selected that evening was from the high ranks of the Nashua Police Department.
It struck me, because the ceremony took place the night before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in Germany and Austria in 1938 that was a turning point of violence at the start of the Shoah. Lela’s grandfather, Laurie’s father Henry Spira, z”l, lived in Vienna, and 80 years he could not go home but had to ride the streetcars to avoid the police. And here was his granddaughter, on stage with a head of the local police, and all those other students, some of whose families as recently as hers or even more recently had what to fear from police or militaries in the lands where their families lived before here.
And that evening was less than two weeks after Pittsburgh.
I have been thinking a lot about what the country is that we live in as American Jews, after the year that has been, and I know you have too.
I have been out in that world this past year, trying to challenge my own assumptions before this year. And I have come to believe that the United States today is, for Jews, that high school stage – where my daughter stood and laughed and took on commitments with other young people, and educators, and the police commander.
That’s what defines where we are. That auditorium. The Tree of Life shooter, the congresswoman from Minnesota, they are in this place and of this place but they do not define it and they do not define our place in it. The people who do not know about Jews or Judaism as anything other than characters mentioned in their sacred texts — they are in this place and of it, but they do not define our place in it.
We, the Jews of the United States of America, are not visitors here – we are builders. We are not here at someone else’s welcome, some someone who might or might not continue to do so — we are partners in this country. We are its creators, and some of us are its leaders.
That is the posture that should define how we are here, and how we respond to any of the challenges hurled at us, and also our responsibility to this place that is our home. Our charge to make this place more like that high school stage.
Anti-Semitism, in its many forms and places, we will and we do recognize and deal with, we must do that – we must do that from our strength here. From our power here. With allies and friends. With ideals and dreams that would make Yeshayahu the prophet proud.
To say any otherwise is to give the others exactly what they want. It is to agree with them that this country is defined by their assumption that we are outsiders. I do not want to agree with them in a single way.
This past year, what a year for Jews in America. Pittsburgh and Poway – these are my friends, my friend whose husband the rabbi hid in a closet during the shooting, my friend who brought chicken soup in the hospital to the courageous SWAT officer who came to defend the synagogue. It was the year of Rep. Ilhan Omar, attacking Jews with the vilest stereotypes. We’ve had Michael Cohen and Jeffrey Epstein. We’ve had the president telling us what it means to be a good Jew. The division of the Women’s March movement leadership because of anti-Semitism.
And Jews will be thrust into the middle again and again in 5780.
Which is why we need to hold onto the idea that we are here and we belong are we are partners. We are not visitors or guests.
It can be hard for us to see that, because this has never happened to us before anywhere in the diaspora. But there has also never been a place like this. To be a Jew in the modern world, at least here and in Israel, is to accept ourselves as makers of history, not objects controlled by others.
I have bet my own life, again and again, on America. For me, being American is not only a historical accident but a choice. Yes, my great-grandparents on both sides fled the empire of the czar for North America around the turn of the 1900s. I was ready to leave after my year in college studying in Israel. I had prepared myself in all kinds of ways to become Israeli. I was, for the first time, a fluent Hebrew speaker. I had wrapped my head around the idea of becoming a soldier, and was working out the difficulties I might face as a Conservative rabbi trying to make a living in Israel.
And to my utter surprise, I discovered within a couple of months back – I was American. I couldn’t stop being American. Even as I was becoming a more observant Jew, and the proportion of my social world that was Jewish was rising at an exponential rate — I couldn’t shake feeling American in my core.
And I realized that it was my Judaism that was making me American, and it was being American that was making me more committed to Judaism.
I am inspired by big American themes: individual potential, a land of immigrants, free choice. I wouldn’t know about them without America – but I see them with Jewish eyes. Individualism for me doesn’t resonate as the frontier and the lone pioneer, but as the sage or activist articulating an unpopular position. Immigration isn’t just a description of how we got here, but it’s whole the Jewish experience in this country. How we made our community through Hebrew free loan societies and Jewish schools and Jewish hospitals and Jewish nursing homes, and also the founding of the ADL a hundred years ago to fight both anti-semitism and racism simultaneously.
When I vote, I say a blessing – Baruch she-asani ben chorin, blessed is the One who has made me free. I stand in the booth thinking not just of self-evident truths, but the Song of the Sea; not just of Jefferson and King George, but Moshe and Pharaoh.
And America has drawn out Judaism in a way no other place ever has or could. It is because we are in America that Jewish thinkers and leaders have had to take a stand on whether Torah mandates justice and concern for non-Jews as well as Jews. It is in America that totalitarianism, the nuclear age, and technology forced Jewish thinkers to ask questions about human power, not just for the sake of our group’s survival, but as a broader ethical issue about the limits of human potential.
It is here that we have had not just the opportunity to sit with leaders of other faiths, but the necessity to answer whether our God is the universal God. Whether other faiths are also authentic searches for truth. And if so, how we should collaborate with leaders of other faiths as moral voices for this society and the world.
The hyphen in Jewish-American isn’t for me a dividing line. It’s not the symbol of a threatening subtraction, a fractioning of my soul, but a multiplication.
And we are more secure here, overall, than many other groups in our country.
As Jews, we are partners in fleshing out the destiny of America’s basic ideas about freedom and individuality. Long ago, in biblical times, it was our ancestors who first brought these revolutionary ideas into the world.
Freedom of thought was Avraham and Sarah, exploring ideas about the Divine and about power, dissenting from the conventional wisdom of their day, smashing idols and moving out.
Freedom from oppression was born in our revolt against Pharaoh.
How could we not want to be part of the one place in the world built on that, how could we not sign on to the project of making freedom even more real, for even more people?
And how can we not want to perfect the ideas of freedom and individuality? When free choice becomes only about the market, and the hours we spend looking at things we can buy and sell. When that threatens to turn us individuals into commodities ourselves, from human beings to eyeballs. Freedom of this sort can leave less time for spiritual freedom, when we are bogged down with so many material demands on our attention. When individuality generates competition, as we look for ways to measure ourselves against each other, superficially, because there is no other common standard we agree on.
Perfecting the idea of freedom – this is part of our mission here. And the work we do here, shaping America and shaping Judaism, we teach to the Jews of the State of Israel.
And freedom has made us stronger. The spiritual free market forces us to do better than say that Judaism is about preserving the past, about not breaking the chain.
So being a Jew in America, there is so much worth protecting, and there is so much worth perfecting. It’s worth protecting ourselves, and what this country is stretching to be.
We are here, as Jews, not only because this place was more safe than the last place. We are here to create this place, to sharpen its ideals, and to make Judaism soar.
When people attack Jews, from any direction, they are attacking our mission here and they are attacking America itself. Anti-Semitism, at its roots, is a futile attempt to run away from the tensions of freedom, and from the splendor of the idea that every human being is valuable.
So standing up for ourselves is about our safety in the moment and it’s about our mission, as builders of America.
We have a basic responsibility to look out for our safety. I have spent hours this past year, and our lay leaders many, many more, focusing on that in very practical terms.
And then my approach to anti-Semitism in our community flows always from our strength – from the confidence of being an American builder, from the friendships we have with so many other groups, and prophetic dreams.
I have gone out into the community, to places where we worry that anti-Semitism incubates. Some of what I have found is how little people know about us and even our most basic culture. In Christian churches, in mosques – some of you have asked me what the Muslim community has to say about Israel, and when I go to find out, the most common response is – we want to know more about Israel.
This past June, I spent parts of three days at a training among progressive community organizers, Jewish and not Jewish, many of them people of color, to talk about anti-Semitism in general and then specifically on the left. I was with people from Boston and New York and Philadelphia, and I was astounded by how many questions the non-Jews had about what it is like to be Jewish today. I am not saying this to excuse any of the horrible things we have heard – but to tell you that there is a whole lot of educating to be done that will make things better, not 100% but better.
I’ve been working with ministers in town to talk about religion in the public schools, and we have framed our work as educating teachers about their role in the great American themes of majorities and minorities, of teaching their children how to be individuals and how to be part of a group. This has led to some fascinating conversations with educators and administrators.
This fall, I am offering a course on Israel and Palestine in both the RISE and OLLI community adult education programs, and I’m oversubscribed already at RISE. It’s my intent to teach about history the best I can, to model a perspective that is Zionist and and ethical.
And we lead and I lead, in collaborations especially with other faith groups working to make Nashua a more inclusive community where people have the means to thrive together. On Sukkot, the festival of booths, we will be hosting a program about affordable housing. On Oct. 27, we are the gathering place for the CROP Walk – this place will be as full as it is today, or people marching and raising money to fight hunger in our area and the developing world. People from more than 25 faith groups, several hundred, will come here and see and experience a synagogue. I hope you will be too, as a volunteer or as a walker.
Our presence as Jews in America is powerful. Our friendships are real. Our mission is profound, Godly, and deeply American. When people attack us, as Jews, we can respond from our strength, a strength which is capable and ethical and American. Those attacks should not define us, must not define us.
About a month after the induction ceremony at Nashua North, the auditorium and stage were filled again for the school musical. It was during Chanukkah, and the nights of rehearsals and performances took some of our kids away from the times we would be lighting our menorahs at home. So a menorah was brought to school – and the other kids asked the Jewish kids to light it and show them, and they danced and sang around the Jewish kids as they sang the blessings.
Let that be how we see ourselves here, as Jews in this land, no matter what the coming year brings. Let us make no excuses that leave us off from the mission that the prophet spoke to us this morning:
If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger, and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves for the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
Then you can seek the favor of Adonai,
and I will set you astride the heights of the earth
And let you enjoy the heritage of your father Yaacov
Ki pi Adonai dibber – For the mouth of Adonai has spoken.
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