Every Tuesday, the Hebrew School at the congregation I serve has a thirty-minute evening service that gives students an opportunity to recite some of the blessings and prayers they are learning. The service also is a time for these 3rd to 6th graders to explore the meaning of prayer. After we recite the t'filah, I lead a short discussion about how prayer can help us grow, discover our strength, and find peace. I have been amazed at the wonderful insights our students have had in these discussions.

Yesterday, appropriately for this week's Thanksgiving holiday, we talked about the experience of gratitude and what it means to say "Thank you" to God. We considered that thanking God is similar to thanking a person who has done a favor for you, and also how it is different. 

One student pointed out that we sometimes say "Thank you" to a person who has done something for us that we cannot immediately reciprocate. If, for example, a person helps you get up when you have fallen, saying "Thank you" is a better response than waiting for that person to fall so you can help him or her  get up! Since God is always doing things for us that we cannot do for God (creating the world, giving us life, making a beautiful sunset, etc.), our best and only way of reciprocating is to say, "Thank you, God."

On the other hand, we also noticed that God does not benefit from our "Thank yous" the way that a person benefits from being appreciated. God does not "need" our thanks the way that a person might. Thanking God may be more of a way to help ourselves than it is to help God. 

By saying "Thank you" to God, we cultivate our own gratitude. We deepen our appreciation for the miracles that surround us every day – the miracles of being alive, of friends and family, of loving and being loved. That is an important quality for us to develop. We live in the wealthiest, freest, most privileged, most technologically advanced society in human history. It is easy for us to forget how fortunate we are. Thanking God is a way of reminding ourselves that we do not have all the wonders that surround us because we deserve them. Praying helps us to remember to be humble, grateful, appreciative and aware. 

As you gather together with friends and family for Thanksgiving, let me suggest that you take a moment of prayer to remember the deep lessons of gratitude. Take some time to say "Thank you" for a world that is a blessing far beyond our ability ever to pay back.

Happy Thanksgiving.

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island.

There is a lesson in this week’s Torah portion (Vayetzei) about fear and anger. The parashah tells us about the twenty years Jacob spent working for his uncle Laban, herding his flocks and working in his fields. Laban had promised Jacob that he could marry his daughter Rachel in exchange for seven years of labor. But after the seven years, Laban tricked Jacob and gave him his older daughter, Leah, instead. Jacob then worked another seven years for Rachel. After that, Jacob worked for Laban for another six years to amass his own wealth. In all of those years, it seems, Laban continued the pattern of tricking and deceiving Jacob; but Jacob never complained.

Finally, after twenty years, Jacob decided that he had had enough. Instead of confronting Laban, though, he and his wives agreed to sneak away from the women’s father and Jacob’s father-in-law, taking his grandchildren and all of their belongings in the dead of the night.

Jacob put his wives, his thirteen children and all of his belongings on camels and, afraid of a confrontation with Laban, he quietly took them away from the only home they had every known. He was ready to give up on Laban without ever saying a word to him about his resentments. His fear kept his anger bottled up.

Before they left, though, Rachel went into her father’s tent and stole the household idols that were a common feature of homes in the Ancient Near East. Why? Did she want them for herself? Or, did she just want to hurt the father who had hurt her, and so she took from him the thing he prized the most? We don’t know. Maybe, she didn’t know, either. Importantly, Jacob was completely unaware that Rachel took the idols.

Laban found out about Jacob’s escape and went after him. When Laban caught up with Jacob, his daughters and his grandchildren, all of the long-simmering resentments came out into the open. Laban railed against Jacob for stealing his daughters and grandchildren. He also cried over the theft of his household idols.

The mention of the idols seem to have pushed Jacob’s anger over the edge. He had put up with this lying, scheming old man for so long that he thought he knew all of his tricks. Now, he must have thought, Laban had gone too far in accusing me of stealing. Jacob told Laban to search through his belongings. He said that if anyone in his party was found to have stollen the idols, they would be put to death. After the search turned up nothing, Jacob told Laban things he should have said years before:

“For twenty years I worked for you. Your female sheep never miscarried and I never ate a single one of your male sheep. I never brought you an animal that had been killed by beasts. I made up the loss myself. I worked through scorching heat that ravaged me by day and frost by night. Sleep fled from my eyes. Had God not been with me all that time, you would have sent me away empty-handed. But God took notice of my plight and the toil of my hands, and God gave judgment last night.”

Jacob’s fear of Laban had been the cork that kept his anger bottled up for twenty years. With the stopper now removed, Jacob’s anger was red hot. He cried out in a fury for the mistreatment he had suffered.

Yet, in his anger, there was so much that Jacob failed to see. He didn’t notice the pain that Laban felt in seeing his family torn away from him. Because Jacob did not bother to find out the truth about Laban’s idols, he placed a decree of death over his beloved wife Rachel. According to rabbinic interpretation, Rachel’s death in childbirth was due to Jacob’s curse against her. Also, Jacob forgot that, for twenty years, he had been a willing participant in Laban’s trickery – that his fears had been a vital ingredient in his poisonous relationship with Laban.

I call the story of Jacob and Laban a true story. Not true in the sense of being historically factual, but true in the sense that it tells truths about our own lives. Our fears and our anger can consume us. They can blind us to reality. They can cause us to curse ourselves and to do things and say things that we will later come to deeply regret.

What do we do in our lives when we are overwhelmed by fear and anger? Do we harbor that anger and let it seethe in us forever? Do we become distracted by it and do we allow it to nestle into the depth of our identity? I believe that this happens often. Individuals who feel that they have been mistreated can allow the story of their fear and anger to become the central story of their lives. Caught in a self-fulfilling cycle in which everything feeds their fear and anger, people can lose touch with reality and rationalize terrible behavior toward others.

Whole nations and whole societies can become consumed by fear and anger in this way. That is, I believe, what has happened in some quarters of the Arab world with regard to terrorist groups like Hezbolah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and now Da’esh. They are so consumed by a narrative in which they believe that they have been victimized by the world that the only thing they can see is their own fear, anger and hatred that they lash out against innocent people. They rationalize the most horrible kinds of behavior – torture, rape and murder – and even believe that it makes them righteous. That kind of fear and anger resulted in five more innocent Israelis murdered this week in Tel Aviv and outside of Jerusalem.

I also believe that we are seeing a cycle of fearful, angry victimhood propelling our great nation, right now, into a different kind of attack on innocent people. There is a lesson in this week’s news about how fear and anger can cause us to do terrible things.
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Paris was attacked by terrorists from Da’esh one week ago today. The murder of more than 120 people and the injury of hundreds more understandably frightened us. It has evoked our justified anger. However, if left unchecked, our fear and anger can expand beyond the boundaries of reality. We can begin to fear that terrorists lurk behind every corner and that every Arab and every Muslim should be suspected. Our angry response to our fears can lead us to choices that betray our values as Jews and as Americans. Ultimately, we may find that our anger causes us to do more harm to ourselves than good.

In particular, the way we treat refugees from the war in Syria – people who are just as much victims of Da’esh as the people of Paris – says a lot about how we respond to our anger and fear. Despite the fact that not a single one of the terrorists in the Paris attacks has yet to be identified as a Syrian, we are seeing these victims of terror now being vilified as terrorists themselves,

This last week in Congress, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States until federal authorities can prove definitively that none of them pose a security threat. Our own Representative Jim Langevin voted in favor of the bill.

Refugees from the war in Syria already face a daunting process before they can enter the United States, a process that lasts over a year and includes in-person interviews with officials from Interpol and the FBI. It would be quite foolish for a would-be terrorist to attempt to enter the United States through this process. Still, the measure passed by the House this week would make the process even more difficult and, perhaps, impossible. This is not the American way. It is not the Jewish way to treat people in distress.

Last month, I took members of our Confirmation class to New York City. We stood on the waterfront of Battery Park and watched the sun set over the Statue of Liberty. I read to the students the words of Emma Lazarus that are inscribed on the pedestal:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Emma Lazarus was a Sephardic Jew who lived at a time when thousands of Ashkenazic Jews were entering the US to escape pogroms in Russian. At the time, most Americans feared the new arrivals. Jewish immigrants, like the Irish and Italians before them, were depicted in the press as disease-carrying filth whose numbers included dangerous anarchists and communists. Politicians stirred the pot of passion, fear and anger by promising to "keep the trash out."

Lazarus wrote the poem, “The New Colossus” to speak up for the American value of inclusion and acceptance of immigrants. She believed that America should be a safe haven for the weary refugees of persecution, war and famine. In addition to her poetry, Lazarus took action on behalf of impoverished Jewish refugees. She helped establish organizations to train destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting.

It is our obligation as Jews and Americans not to stand in the way of helping people in need. Indeed, our obligation is very much the reverse – we are commanded to be compassionate towards the most vulnerable and to look out for the interests of the stranger because, as the Torah teaches, we know the heart of the stranger (Exodus 23:9). Emma Lazarus’ words and actions reflect what America stands for and what Judaism stands for. We must not be ruled by our fear and anger.

Anger can be a motivation to do what is right and good – to take action against injustice. But, as this week’s Torah portion shows us, anger, when it is coupled with misunderstanding, fear, and plain old ignorance can lead us into saying things and doing things against our perceived enemies that we will later regret.

The true story of Jacob and Laban from the Torah is a practical lesson in its application to the world today, and it is a deeply spiritual lesson for the way we live our individual lives. We cannot allow our anger to rule over us, to consume us. Anger can swallow us whole and make us believe that we are justified in hurting others. Instead of being ruled by our anger, it is our duty to be the one who rules over our passions and direct them toward the cause of justice and righteousness, not to give in to fear and ignorance.

Shabbat shalom.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Balak: Curses, Foiled Again.
​Government Shutdown and the Talmud

Unlike other ancient books and stories, the Hebrew Bible does not offer any "perfect" characters. All of the Bible's great and pious heroes have at least one instance in which they are shown to be deeply flawed. Moses flies into rages and David sleeps with other men's wives. In the Hebrew Bible there is nothing like a Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed who exhibits godlike perfection. Jews seem to like the realism in the way the Hebrew Bible presents its heroes as humanly flawed.

But there is another way of looking at the Bible's imperfect heroes. We might ask, "Even if a human being could be perfect, would it be possible to behave perfectly in such an imperfect world as ours? What would flawlessness even look like in a reality that sometimes leaves us with no good choices?" We may actually come to the conclusion that to be a truly righteous person in this flawed world, one must adopt behaviors that appear to be unrighteous.

In this week's Torah portion (Toledot), for example, we see the patriarch Jacob behaving in ways that seem morally questionable. He deceived his father Isaac and cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright. Yet, it can be argued that Jacob's deceit served a higher purpose and was actually righteous. His father Isaac, after all, was blinded by his fears and his carnal appetites. If left to his own devices, he would have made a terrible decision. Esau, Jacob's brother, was manifestly unfit to be a leader of God's people. Jacob stole the birthright from him because it was what was necessary to secure the future of his people and to allow God's will to be realized.

So then, why does Isaac say that Jacob acted "with guile" (b'mirmah, Gen. 27:35) in deceiving his father and stealing from his brother? It does not sound like a word you would use to describe the behavior of a righteous person. It is the same Hebrew word that Amos used to describe the dishonest scales and weights that the wicked use to cheat the poor (Amos 8:5). Not very nice.

But, in the case of Jacob deceiving his father and stealing from his brother, Rashi says (following the translation of Onkolos) that the word "guile" actually means "wisdom." Sometimes, in this world, to act with guile – even with treachery – is the path of wisdom.

A story about Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt (the great-great-grandfather of the 20th century rabbi of the same name) illustrates this point. The story (told in Aharon Yaakov Greenberg's Itturei Torah, 1:240), says that there was once a dispute in the town of Apta between two esteemed families. The families brought the dispute to Rabbi Heschel and he ruled in favor of one of the two families. After that, the family that lost the dispute began spreading gossip saying that the rabbi was corrupt. The gossiping got so bad that some said that the integrity of the whole town was questionable because of the corruption of its rabbi.

Rabbi Heschel did not defend himself or argue against the charge of corruption. Rather, he stated plainly, "Truly, this is a place of error." However, he said, the real test of truth is not in the way things seem on the surface.

"The real vision of truthfulness," said Heschel, "is the vision demonstrated by the patriarchs – but not that of Abraham, the man of faith, and not that of Isaac, who was willing to sacrifice his own life. It cannot be them. Rather, it is the vision of Jacob who stole the birthright from Esau for a pot of lentils, who tricked his father into blessing him, and who outwitted Laban. It is precisely he who is praised for truthfulness by the prophet who said, 'You shall give truth to Jacob' (Micah 7:20). We must be blessed with the most subtle discernment to understand where truth is."

What was Rabbi Heschel trying to say? It seems that to be able to see the truth in this confusing and muddled world requires all the cleverness of a con man, the guile of a trickster. It is Jacob who is the paradigm of truth because it is he who has the craft to cut to the essence of impossible situations in which there are never black and white answers, only shades of gray.  It requires skill to discern where, amongst the gray choices of reality, the truth is best to be found.

Rabbi Heschel began his answer by saying, “Truly, this is a place of error.”  It was not just a clever rhetorical flourish to answer a false charge of corruption. He was talking about something bigger than just the town of Apta. In Heschel's response, “this place” is really the world. Our reality is not a place where the truth is obvious to any person of simple faith and earnest devotion (like Abraham and Isaac). Rather, in “this place,” filled with error, we are forever searching to find the best answer to life’s tests without ever being able to be certain that we have hit upon “the truth.”

And, there is an important lesson here, also, about the nature of forgiveness and self-forgiveness. We often are quick to judge others and, even more, ourselves, for failures in judgment. We imagine that there is some ideal solution to any given problem we may face in life. The real truth is that this is an illusion.  Most of life’s most important challenges – how to deal with the conflicts within families, communities, friends and foes – don’t have any black and white answers. 

Often, the best we can hope to do is to use all of our skill to come up with clever solutions that do the most good and the least harm. It is good to be good, but sometimes it is just as important to be clever. As Rashi taught, guile really can be wisdom in another form.

Instead of criticizing others and ourselves for not dealing with life’s difficulties in the “perfect” way, we should practice forgiveness and recognize that we are all just doing the best we can in an a world filled with uncertainty and imperfection. 


Other Posts on this Topic:
Noah: The Redemption of God
​Vayakhel-Pekudei: Being a Dwelling for God

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island.

Twenty years ago, I was a first-year rabbinic student at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. That year was a momentous one for me, filled with unforgettable experiences. It was the honeymoon year for my wife, Jonquil, and me. We married in May of 1995 and flew to Israel just a month later for me to begin my rabbinic studies. It also was the first time I had ever been to Israel. I spent the year struggling to learn Hebrew, struggling to understand a culture very different from that of the United States, struggling to survive a very rigorous academic program.

That also was the year that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. For Israelis, it was their JFK assassination. Only it was worse. It was the moment in which everything that Israelis knew about their country changed overnight. It was a moment when, for some Israelis, a dream of peace was shattered; and for other Israelis, it was a moment when a horrifying disaster was averted.

For me, a Jewish American who felt deeply connected to Israel, and yet not really a part of Israeli society, it was a moment of disorientation within disorientation. It was shattering and heartbreaking. It was a time of seeing Israelis at their best, and at their worst. It was a moment I will never forget within a year that I will never forget.

Here is what happened.

On the night of Saturday, November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was leaving a huge peace rally at Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. He walked down the steps of Tel Aviv City Hall toward his car. A man named Yigal Amir slipped through the bodyguards to fire two shots into Rabin’s back with a semi-automatic pistol. Amir had painstakingly modified the weapon and the bullets over the previous two years with the single intention of killing the Prime Minister. Rabin was taken to a nearby hospital after a period of confusion. Rabin died on the operating table less than an hour later.

When Israelis learned that Rabin had been shot, most assumed that the assassin was a Palestinian Arab. The truth was much harder to accept. Yigal Amir was an orthodox Jew who, like many other Israelis who identified with the political and religious right, stood in angry opposition to the peace process that Rabin had championed. The Israeli right was angry about the signing of the Oslo Accords, which would place large parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) under the control of the Palestinians. There was even talk of a peace deal that would return the Golan Heights to Syria. The country was divided and the rhetoric had been getting ugly.

In the weeks before Rabin’s assassination, there had been posters and billboards around the country (I remember seeing them) that pictured Rabin in the black and white keffiyeh headdress worn by Yassir Arafat and other Palestinian nationalists. There was a poster plastered around the country showing Rabin dressed in a Nazi officer’s uniform.

Yigal Amir was seized and arrested immediately after shooting Rabin. Eventually, he was put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the days after the assassination, there were numerous news reports that Amir had received approval for his assassination attempt beforehand from right-wing rabbis who declared that it a case of “din rodef,” the law that permits one to kill a pursuer in order to prevent him from killing first. To this day, there are many right-wing Israelis – almost 50 percent – who believe conspiracy theories that say that Amir was not Rabin’s true killer.

I had gone to bed early with a headache that Saturday night. Jonquil stayed up to read. A few hours later, she came into our bedroom to wake me up because she had noticed that all of the Israeli television stations had gone off the air. She was concerned because they all had the same Hebrew message on a black screen. She couldn’t read Hebrew, but she sensed that something was very wrong. I got up, looked at the screen, and told her what it said. “Broadcasting is suspended in respect to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, may his memory be a blessing.”

We were stunned. We didn’t understand how Rabin, the virile former army commander could be dead. We turned on our short-wave radio and listened to the BBC World Service tell us that Rabin had been assassinated. We cried.

The next day, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv to mourn Rabin’s death. They lit candles. They sang songs. In Jerusalem, more than a million people lined up to view his casket in front of the Knesset to pay their last respects. Jonquil and I were among them. We walked along the route to the viewing area with some of my classmates from HUC. I have never heard so much silence from so many people. The line just shuffled along with nothing more than quiet murmurs for hours. We later heard one news report that said that one in six of all of the adults in the entire country had viewed the casket that day.

On Monday, November 6, 1995, twenty years ago today, Rabin was buried on Mount Herzl. The funeral was attended by many world leaders, including President Bill Clinton. He closed his eulogy with the words, “Shalom, chaver” “Goodbye, friend.” I watched on television in my apartment along with a few of my classmates, including Helen Abrams’ grandson, Michael Schwartz. I remember that Michael and I stood up in front of the television when we heard them reciting the Kaddish.

Israelis love bumper stickers. In the days that followed the funeral, many of the political bumper stickers in Jerusalem – left and right – were replaced with new stickers that said, "Shalom chaver," "Goodbye friend."

I wrote an email (which was still a novelty in those days) to all of my family and friends back in the United States on the day after the funeral. I told them about what my professors had to say in the days following the assassination. This is what I wrote:

“My teachers – all of whom have lived in Israel for many years, and some of whom are native – spoke to us of their feeling that ‘the writing was on the wall’ for such a thing to happen. Israeli society has become increasingly fractured in recent years. The level of violence among Jews has grown. Lines of 'normal' communication between supporters and opponents of the peace process have been almost completely cut off by anger and by the nearly total division between Israel’s ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ societies.

“One of my professors said she was devastated by a threefold tragedy: that this happened in the Land of Israel, that it was perpetrated by a Jew, and, most grievously, that it was done in the name of Judaism. Judaism is the religion that is so sensitive to the spilling of blood, she said, that we cannot even kill an animal for food without acknowledging God’s sovereignty over all life. Judaism is the religion whose creation is bound in the moment that Avraham’s knife was stopped from taking the life of another Yitzhak. How has Judaism been torn to shreds, that it could be twisted to justify this?”

I pondered in my email back to the States, “What will happen now in Israel? Today there sprung up all over Jerusalem a new poster with Rabin’s face. Under the photo are familiar words from the Kaddish, ‘Oseh shalom bimromav.’ In the context of the prayer, the words mean, ‘May the one who makes peace in heaven,’ but in this context they could be translated as, ‘The one who makes peace is in God’s heaven.’ Maybe Rabin’s death will draw together the people of Israel to find a way to reach reconciliation. If so, we will continue the prayer to say, ‘he will make peace over us all and for all Israel.’”

Twenty years later, I look back on the moment of Rabin’s assassination not as a moment of rebirth and renewal, not a moment that unified the Jewish people, but as a harbinger of two decades of deeper divisions, heightened partisanship and polarization, and waning interest in keeping the Jewish people together. I cannot tell you had sad that makes me feel.

Today, Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv has been renamed Yitzhak Rabin Square. Yet, Israel’s current Prime Minister has done little to keep alive the dream of peace that Rabin tried to make real. Walking by the square in the streets of Tel Aviv, there are many school children who have to ask their parents, “Who was Yitzhak Rabin?”

I will admit that I am not nearly as optimistic about the future today as I was twenty years ago. I am sure that my change in spirit has a lot to do with the difference between being 32 and being 52. Twenty years ago, I was ready to see signs everywhere that the tide was turning, that the instinct toward peace would inevitably win out over the instinct toward fear and separation.

Now, I am not so sure. But that turn from optimism toward the direction of pessimism has only redoubled my resolve that we must do whatever we can to help peace win. I no longer believe that peace is inevitable. It will only happen if we force it into existence. We must work with all our might to make it real.

Shabbat shalom.