Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 23, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

What I’m about to say this week might be troubling or uncomfortable for some of you to hear. Some of you may even be offended, for the same reasons or maybe for opposite ones. I’m going to have to let that be, in the hopes that something in it may also inspire you. As always, I’m happy to talk and, more importantly, to listen. But we’ll get to that.

As you know, there is an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on Monday afternoon at the Episcopal Church just down the street from us. I’m looking forward to sharing this experience with my new colleagues, with our fellow citizens of Cape Ann, and, of course, with you. But getting to this point has not been simple. The planning process has been filled with misunderstanding, awkwardness, and some well-intentioned cultural appropriation. Knowing that it’s worked out well, I want to share a bit about how it unfolded and what it’s taught me.

Believe it or not, this will tie back to the parsha.

When I first saw the service plan for the interfaith event, my heart sank: the primary musical expression was hymns; some of the names for God were atypical in Jewish parlance; there was an offertory planned, complete with collection plates! And the only explicitly Jewish thing was something that’s so out of place for this season and setting as to be absurd. My well-intentioned colleagues, knowing that we Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a divine figure, had studiously avoided any reference to him. But still, the absence of Jesus did not make it authentically interfaith. In that first iteration, this was clearly a Christian service at which I was to be a welcome guest.

I knew I couldn’t participate in something like that, but also—once I cooled down—I knew that if I just walked away and didn’t speak up, not only would I be the one who was unable to do interfaith work, but I would be giving up on the chance to help our treasured Jewish values and culture be more known. So with my heart in my throat, I wrote a message to articulate all the ways in which the service as it was then configured missed the mark as an authentically interfaith endeavor. And, not wanting to just point out the problems, I offered some suggestions for how to bring it more into alignment with our shared intention.

Thankfully, my colleagues were more than receptive, and eager to learn why elements of the service—things that are totally normal to them because of the world we live in—were actually just not quite right. They took my feedback without defensiveness, and what we’ve gone on to create feels like a truly interfaith effort. And in the meanwhile, these folks who couldn’t have known any better about what they were doing wrong, now know a little bit more and will surely do better next time.

That feeling of misalignment, of being a minority in a majority culture is something that we as Jews experience all the time. Although we are blessed to live in less difficult times than many of our ancestors did, there are still occasions, such as my experience with the interfaith clergy, when the dominance of the dominant culture is so strong that it begins to seem more like wallpaper. We don’t even notice it. All the more so, the folks who hung the wallpaper in the first place really don’t notice it.

This feeling of being slightly out of step with our surroundings, the sense of being here but not here, is part of the Jewish soul. I think it has always been with us in one way or another. We see it in the opening of our parsha, Chayei Sarah. Avraham, who has made his way to Eretz Cana’an—the land of Canaan—in fulfillment of the divine message he heard years ago, pauses from mourning his wife Sarah. Then, he sets about finding a place to bury her. Seeing as he has no ancestors and no land holding of his own in that region, he has to seek assistance from the Hittites, the very people God has told him to supplant. He begins:

גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם
I am a stranger dwelling among you

Ger: stranger, toshav: dweller, these two words pulling in opposite directions. Even the calligraphy in the scroll shows it, connecting the two words with a makef, a slight horizontal line that visually counteracts their inherent tension. There’s a whole world in that makef, a sense of the paradox that so many of us live inside.

From the stories I’ve heard, both past and present, the experience of being Jewish on the North Shore, of being Jewish in Gloucester, has a lot of resonance with that makef. In decades past, there was a thriving Jewish merchant presence in downtown Gloucester and, at the same time, the beach clubs didn’t allow Jews on the premises. Ger v’toshav. Here and not here.

Perhaps that tension is still present today, as evidenced by my experience with the Thanksgiving service, and as evidenced by the strong feelings that are surfacing with respect to the Gloucester City Council’s back-and-forthing about whether and how to both acknowledge the realities of antisemitism and be even-handed in the matter of rejecting all forms of bigotry and hatred. Both of these are important values that deserve to be uplifted. Antisemitic attacks and rhetoric have increased at alarming rates in the past year. This needs our attention and advocacy. But surely that does not negate the necessity to vigorously reject other forms of bigotry and hatred like Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. While local City Council votes don’t appear to have a great deal of influence on the course of history, the manner in which this debate plays out will tell us a lot about the community we share, both within these walls and outside them.

This is a matter about which there can be a wide range of reasonable, ethical, well-considered, and deeply-felt responses. If there were one obvious response, we would all agree on it, because we are all good and moral people. The fact that there is disagreement indicates that it’s complex and doesn’t lend itself to slogans or sound bites or oversimplification. What this moment demands of us is not to silo ourselves with our own ideas but rather to listen for what we might be missing. Our tradition makes a spiritual practice of considering multiple viewpoints, as even a cursory glance at a page of Talmud will demonstrate. Our core theological teaching begins with the word שמע—listen! Our way of being in community asks us to remain in conversation, even when what we hear challenges our own assumptions and preferences.

Going back to the matter of ger v’toshav: the 12th century French commentator, the Bechor Shor, reads our pasuk along with the one after it, in which the Hittites answer Avraham saying, oh no, you are no stranger but a prince of God among us. The Bechor Shor fills in the space between psukim, making this lovely connection. He writes:

גר שבאתי מארץ אחרת ותושב שדעתי להתיישב עמכם
והם השיבו אין אתה גר בעינינו רק נשיא אלקים
Stranger: for I came from a different land. Resident: because I intend to settle here with you. And they answered him: you are not a stranger in our eyes, but rather a prince of God.

Avraham, the stranger who dwells among, the figure known for his own sense of hospitality and capacity to connect, had become known in the eyes of the Hittites and, for the Bechor Shor at least, this made all the difference. I imagine them listening well enough to get beyond the trap of thinking he is completely different and therefore unreachable—and also to get beyond the trap of thinking he’s just a slightly different version of themselves.

By working through those misconceptions, they are able to see his humanity, and thereby to soften the strangeness with which they’d regarded him prior. They come to see the צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—the divine image—within him. He becomes, in their eyes, a prince of God.

As we face the gathering darkness, may we meet it with the courage to allow ourselves to be known by those whose intentions are wholesome, and may we listen carefully to the voices around us that challenge us, locating the divine every place it can be found. As we read in Avot chapter 2, mishnah 5:

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Shabbat shalom!

A Kippah in the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot

“Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me!”

I turn around. It’s pandemic springtime, and the Trader Joe’s parking lot is bustling. What does this stranger want from me?

“Do you always wear … [gesturing at my kippah]?” Aged perhaps in his mid to late 60s, friendly but not smiling, he speaks with an Israeli accent.

“I do. I mean, not while I’m sleeping, but yeah. I wear it regularly.”

“Can you tell me why?”

I have been wearing a kippah daily for over a year. In all that time, I’ve never been asked this question so bluntly. People have commented that they noticed, but never asked me to explain myself.

I stammer a moment.

Why indeed?

And why is he asking?

Lacking any ability to size him up or assess his motivation for asking, I plunge in awkwardly. “I wear it to remind myself that there’s something much larger than me, to remind myself that this is God’s world, not mine. שְׁכִינָה לְמַעְלָה מֵרֹאשִׁי [God’s presence is above my head, BT Kiddushin 31b] you know?”

“That’s… interesting,” he says, not walking away. He clearly wants to talk.

“There was another attack on a rabbi recently. Why are you tempting fate, wearing a kippah? Are you scared,” he asks.

“I sometimes think I should be, but so far, I’m not.”

When the Chabad attacks happened, I thought about stopping, about putting it away for a while. When the Colleyville synagogue attack happened, I again considered changing my habits, but for now I’m holding steady. I don’t want to be fearful, and I don’t want to lean on the privilege to hide what makes me a potential target, when so many people can’t hide what makes them targets. I am not a Jew of convenience. This is who I am.

A few weeks back I had been in a different part of the country, in a semi-rural area, and I thought long and hard about whether to put it away for the sake of not riling up people I thought might be anti-Semitic. In the end I didn’t, and I’m glad. The locals were friendly and respectful. It taught me something about stereotyping and how it goes both ways.

“What about respect for the tradition?” When his Holocaust-survivor mother came to visit from Israel several months ago, he wanted to show her how it really is here, so he took her to a local Conservative synagogue. She was so offended by the sight of men and women sitting together, all wearing tallit and kippah, that she didn’t speak to him for a week.

“Are you offended by my wearing a kippah,” I asked him.

“No, but my mother probably would be.”

What would she think about me, a woman pursuing rabbinic ordination? Would she even have a box to put me in? I am not Jewish the way she is Jewish, his story made that clear. My kippah would be the least of her objections, or maybe the most. In her world, I am perhaps barely Jewish — a novice Hebrew speaker, who doesn’t know how to keep kosher and who routinely watches a family movie after Shabbat dinner for the sake of sh’lom bayit. She and I have gender in common, and motherhood, but what would we find to share about our respective Jewishness?

“There’s a group of women,” he said. He invoked Sarah Silverman so he could leverage my familiarity with the comedian to refer me to her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman. He seemed surprised when I was familiar with both Silvermans. (I didn’t blow his mind by saying that one of Rabbi Silverman’s children had once babysat mine.) “It’s provocative, who do they think they are, coming to pray, disrupting the men’s prayers?”

He asked if I would come to the Kotel to pray, and I said yes. “Would you come with the disrupters?”

“Of course. I want to pray with my people.”

“But that’s what the women’s section is for!”

I started to wonder about the power of religious symbols. When I wear a kippah, what it means to me and what it means to others varies widely. Who gets to own the meaning of these symbols? Who owns that pile of golden stones, the last surviving wall of our people’s ancient place? Who gets to say who prays there?

We are family and perhaps fellow believers, but we are not having the same conversation, most of the time.

I also wonder, why am I freer to be the kind of Jewish I am, here in the US than I would be in the Jewish Homeland?

“Listen, I hate the ultra-Orthodox,” he says. “Most Israelis do. But let me tell you. If you go to Jerusalem wearing a kippah, they will stone you. Believe me. I’m not even kidding. They will stone you.”

Where does stoning fall, in the rubric of klal Yisrael, I wonder.

If most Israelis hate the ultra-Orthodox, why don’t they speak up? Why doesn’t he speak up? He warns me about them, but he wouldn’t stand up to them for my right to be Jewish the way I am Jewish?

Who’s in and who’s out?

Would he stand up against a non-Jew in my defense? Where are the places where we are the same? What’s the boundary of peoplehood, and does it shift according to who’s issuing the threats?

And what does he expect from me? Do I have a say, since I am not in Israel, facing the dangers that Israelis face on a daily basis?

The man and I have a long conversation, right there in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Midway through, a friend I hadn’t seen in many months approaches and gives me a hug. “So good to see you!” “So good to see you, too! It’s been a long time.”

I consider saying Shehecheyanu, just to see how he would respond.

I turn back. He’s still there.

One Way and Another

Imagine a meeting of a twelve-step program: the circle of folding chairs, the people milling around. Here’s someone nursing a cup of watery black coffee. Here’s someone else, three days sober, skittering with anxiety. Here’s someone else silently weeping; he almost slipped last night and he is scared.

The meeting begins. One by one, people introduce themselves.

I am Joey, and I’m the father of three beautiful daughters.

I am Prithi, and I sing cabaret.

I am Jake, and my house burned down two weeks ago.

I am Sarah, and I just launched a new tech start up.

I am Ella, and I am a full-time caregiver for my developmentally disabled sister.

I am Hakeem, and I am a published poet.

I am Geoff, and I can fix any car, anytime.

I am Lizzy, and I just lost my father.

Perhaps the setting lulled you into thinking that you know the people involved. How easy it is to assume that everyone at a twelve-step meeting has only one salient characteristic: their addiction. And yet…while everyone at the meeting has come there for support in coping with the effects of addiction, each one has his or her or their own path that’s led to this point. Each individual speaker is much more than the story of addiction that brought them to this moment. As beautifully expressed by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, we are all made up of multiple storylines and multiple threads.

It is tempting — nearly inevitable — to assume that we know somebody because we know one or two or even five things about them. Yet every single one of us contains multiple experiences, multiple cultures, multiple points of view.

What does Judaism do with this? How does our sacred wisdom prepare us to take this in, to navigate this space of riotous color and shimmering individuality?

Consider a page of Talmud. Laid out like a puzzle, or a paper with every inch of margin scrawled with notes and responses and questions, the Talmud is replete with conflicting ideas, interpretations, and viewpoints playing out on the page. Jewish learning is a boisterous conversation across time and space and involving multiple people, sources, and ideas.

Like a page of Talmud, each of us is a flavorful combination of many different ideas, themes, characteristics, and experiences.

The multiplicity of identity has been playing in my mind quite a bit these past few days, as the news of basketball great Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash spread. This sudden, tragic loss of a young man is complicated by the fact that in 2003, Bryant was accused of raping a nineteen-year-old woman in a Colorado hotel. The charges were dropped when the woman declined to testify in court. She later brought a civil suit, which was settled out of court. Eventually Bryant acknowledged that he regarded their encounter as consensual sex while his accuser did not. He apologized.

Following this awful incident, Bryant went on to live his life in ways that suggest he learned and grew and changed. He became an outspoken supporter of women’s athletics. He eventually came to use his celebrity to support political causes that were meaningful to him. He became a father to four children, one of whom, sadly, died with him in the crash.

I do not condone rape or sexual assault, but I do absolutely condone teshuvah. My feelings are complicated as the story of Bryant’s life and death plays out in the media against the backdrop of the pluralism learning my cohort has recently engaged in. If our lives all comprise multiple threads, what if one of those threads is truly awful? Is an otherwise good life ruined by one horrific act? Can an array of generous, wholesome choices, including a genuine apology, atone for one crude and violent one? What is the sum of a life?

We learned in our pluralism seminar that one definition of idolatry is the isolation and worship of a single aspect of the Divine, to the exclusion of other characteristics. Our teacher, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, extended the definition, writing, “It is similarly idolatrous to take one aspect of a human being — created in the divine image — and mistake it for the whole.” We are — each and every one of us — created in Gd’s complicated image, our very ordinariness full of mystery.

One way to understand Gd’s many facets is as multiple pathways to access the Divine. The Sfat Emet’s read on Sh’mot 20:15, in Rabbi Arthur Green’s translation, says: “All the people saw the voices. The voice was that which said, ‘I am YHWH your Gd.’ Each one of Israel saw the root of his or her [or their] own life force.” In this interpretation we see the interplay between singular and plural (voice and voices), the ways in which Gd is One and yet can be understood in infinite ways. Individual senses are blurred, such that sound is both seen and heard. Yet the voice that comes to each person is exactly the right voice for him or her or them, a voice tuned exactly to their frequency.

Think also of the role of the new year in the liturgy and the calendar cycle: we celebrate the new year in four different ways and at four different times, focusing this time on redemption and this time on nature, this time on getting our economic accounts in order and this time in accounting for our souls and deeds. But day by day, we call for blessing on the year as part of the tefillah, asking Gd to make this year the best among the best. Each day is both a beginning and a continuation, each year a whole and a part.

One beauty of our tradition is that there both is and is not a single story of Gd. When addicts turn to a higher power, as in the vignette that opened this post, they are seeking the same thing — an anchor against the disorienting forces of addiction — but they each seek the aspect of it that will keep them, each in the fullness of their own individuality, centered. Just as the addicts resemble one another in one way but are thoroughly unique in other ways, so it is with Gd. The mechanic’s Gd and the caregiver’s Gd, the proud father’s Gd and the bereaved daughter’s Gd are One and not the same.