First Narayever Congregation
Rabbi Ed Elkin
September 27, 2003
Boundaries
This summer I picked up the writer Anne Roiphe’s memoir, 1185 Park Avenue. It tells of her life growing up in a terribly dysfunctional family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 30’s and 40’s. Her mother was the heiress of the Van Heusen shirt company, and so while the country suffered depression and war, for Anne and her brother material riches were never in short supply, even if domestic peace and harmony always were. In one of her chapters, Roiphe describes her family’s connection to their Jewish roots. Her parents’ Jewish identity was largely defined by the anti-Semitism of the times – by the clubs they couldn’t join and the schools they couldn’t send their kids to and the law firms where they couldn’t practice. Otherwise, there was very little Jewish content in their family life. Christmas was celebrated in grand style; dietary laws and other distinctive Jewish practices were completely ignored.
Consistent with this approach, when the High Holidays rolled around each year, her father refused to have anything to do with it. Ridiculous, superstitious, mumbo jumbo ladies stuff, he called it. More productive to go for a long walk in Central Park. Roiphe’s mother Blanche, however, went to synagogue, and she took the children with her. This is how Roiphe describes the scene:
“My mother did not understand a word of Hebrew because she was never taught, but she knew by rote some of the passages… [For me] standing up, sitting down, every line repeated over and over, the ark opened and closed, time was frozen, boredom and sleepiness came over me. My mother and her sister Libby whispered to each other in a steady drone…At last my mother would squeeze my shoulder and we would push our way to the aisle so we could leave the synagogue and stand on the front steps. My mother would pick up her veil, the one with rhinestone sequins scattered in the black netting that was attached to her stylish hat, and light up her cigarette and blow smoke rings out over the coming and going congregants. Happy New Year everyone said and I was kissed and kissed by women and men. Behind each Happy New Year I heard an anxious ringing, don’t get sick, don’t let the enemy win the war, don’t let the stock market fall, don’t let my business fail, don’t let this be the year my spouse is run over by a truck, killed in a train accident. Happy New Year, let only good things, honey and apples, sweetness and love befall you, [yes] all the rest is there, biding its time, [but] not now, not this happy new year.”
I liked Roiphe’s description, because I felt that she captured a strange combination that characterizes the yontif experience of many: utter alienation from the proceedings, combined with an unconscious genuine spiritual connection to the actual meaning of the day. Alienation, rooted in ignorance of the Hebrew language and the Jewish prayer tradition. Connection, rooted in that “anxious ringing” that Anne Roiphe heard behind all those “Happy New Years”. Alienation, demonstrated in the constant whispering during the service, the smoking on the synagogue steps, the annual Christmas parties, the home life devoid of Jewish content. Connection, demonstrated by the fact that in a perhaps surprising way, her mother and the others actually did “get it”. They understood that this time of transition in the year was one both filled with wonderful potential, and fraught with terrible danger. They understood that such unpredictability could only inspire the deepest and most desperate petitionary prayer – let this be a good year for me and my loved ones, let nothing dreadful happen to us. Translated into the language of the machzor, what they were really saying was, grant us one more year in the Book of Life. They were, in effect, acknowledging God as Avinu Malkenu, sovereign over their vulnerable, insecure lives. What could be more true to the spirit of the Yamim Noraim than that?
More than sixty years later, we still live with the same kind of fearsome unpredictability that Anne’s mother and her friends gave expression to in their anxious new year’s greetings, the same vulnerability that our ancestors experienced and gave expression to in our liturgy of these Yamim Noraim. This year of 5763 that we’ve now concluded saw many developments which made us shudder with fear, made us newly aware of our own vulnerability and insecurity. A deadly new disease spread in our community this year, with no one sure (at least at the beginning) how or when it would be contained. A ten year old girl walking home in broad daylight in our community was kidnapped and brutally murdered. Across the sea, the first faint glimmers of hope that maybe the Israeli-Palestinian violence of the last three years could be overcome, were extinguished in the carnage of a fresh string of suicide bombings and reprisals with no end in sight. War on a mass scale became part of our reality again this year, with the conflict in Iraq and its unsettled aftermath demonstrating how far the world is from achieving the prophetic dream of peace, and how far we are still from achieving consensus on how best to confront evil. This year demonstrated that the heightened sense of vulnerability brought about by 9/11 still pervades our lives two years later. Our economy was still shaky, and the new anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism showed no signs of abating. And the end of 5763 proved that the assumption on which our entire culture and civilization is based, the assumption that unlimited electricity would always be available to us to power the gadgets and gizmos upon which we have come to utterly depend, cannot actually be taken for granted after all. If Anne Roiphe heard anxious ringing behind her mother’s “Happy New Year”s, then we should hear those bells pealing no less in our own time. And so like her mother we say, grant us please one more year of life: no tragedies, no illnesses, no surprises, please please please.
So maybe Anne’s mother was more connected to the meaning of yontif than she appeared. But if so, if she actually did “get it”, if she did understand the spiritual message of vulnerability and petition that characterizes so much of our High Holy Day liturgy, why wasn’t she able to make the leap of positive identification with the tradition which provided the context for the expression of those feelings? The service was just a drone to her, something to be borne each year because it was the right and expected thing to do and not because she perceived of or was conscious of any inherent meaning in it. Those few moments with her friends and acquaintances on the synagogue steps seem to have had more spiritual meaning for her than all the hours spent inside.
Before I came to Toronto in the year 2000, I served as a Hillel director in North Carolina. Although I was based at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was also responsible for several smaller colleges in the area, one of which was called Elon College. Now, to give you an idea of the flavour of this campus, the name of the athletic teams for Elon was the Fighting Christians! Well, nestled among all these Fighting Christians were perhaps a dozen or fifteen Jewish students, and as Hillel director I tried to ensure that they would have some modicum of Jewish programming on their campus. What they said they wanted was social progamming, and that’s what we provided – picnics, movies, that kind of a thing.
One young man in the group, however, never quite fit in. Adam came from a pretty strong Jewish background up north, and he would attend all the Hillel programs we offered at Elon, but clearly he felt different. And while the Hillel kids were friendly and would endeavour to include him, in the end he really just didn’t click with them. One day I got a call at my office from another Hillel member. It seems that Adam had started attending a group on campus where he was told that he could become a “completed Jew”. It was an evangelical club that had attracted him through their prayers and their singing and their powerful spiritual message. They were encouraging him, they said, not to leave his Judaism behind, but rather to take what they described as the next step and become a “messianic” Jew. Here, he clicked. The picnics and the pizza parties favoured by the Hillel students didn’t do it for him. It’s not what he was looking for. The life of the spirit is what fascinated him, and he hadn’t found it in the Jewish community at Elon College. He found it in this group and within months he had gotten baptized.
As someone who has dedicated his life to helping people find just those connections between their own genuine spiritual quest and the riches of the Jewish tradition, I naturally find these accounts of Blanche and Adam disturbing.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about Blanche and Adam this year because of the Jews for Jesus’ recent foray into Toronto. I’m sure most of you read about or heard about this three-week campaign, part of a series of missionary efforts by the organization in various large North American cities. Maybe you even encountered some of them handing out leaflets on street corners, designed to convince Jews that it’s not either/or, that one can be both Jewish and Christian at the same time, that accepting Jesus as one’s savior is but the natural next step along an authentic Jewish spiritual path. The connection to Adam’s story is obvious, but even Blanche’s story represents a melding of the Jewish and Christian worlds on the social level that poses many challenges to the maintenance of a distinctive Jewish identity. I raise this topic not because I’m afraid that the folks present in this room are terribly susceptible to the enticements of Jews for Jesus, but rather because the presence of this organization in our midst forces even committed Jews to articulate answers to some hard questions that we often don’t force ourselves to articulate: first, in the context of a pluralistic Jewish community, why are Jews for Jesus beyond the pale? Second, if we’re not for Jesus, what are we for? I’d like to address each of these questions in turn.
First: if we’re not fundamentalist Orthodox, and if we therefore accept the possibility of different streams and different interpretations of Judaism, on what basis do we exclude Jews for Jesus? What can I say to someone like Adam, who has been told that his baptism is not only not contrary to Judaism, it is in fact the very fulfillment of it? What makes that belief different from other beliefs expressed by Jews that I disagree with, but which I accept as legitimately and authentically Jewish? I may vociferously disagree for example with those who say that women should be excluded from equal participation in the ritual life of the synagogue. But I think that those who hold such views are still authentic Jews and what they practice is Judaism. Even the assimilating Blanche retains her claim to Jewish identity. What makes Jews for Jesus different?
I want to share with you two different types of reasons, one sociological and the other theological. First, the sociological: we’re a tiny minority group, and for any small group to exist, there must be some way to ascertain who’s part of the group and who isn’t.
It doesn’t mean that one has to have a hostile relationship with what’s outside the group. Hopefully, we can have a positive, friendly, mutually beneficial relationship with those outside. It shouldn’t have to be an electrified separation fence with barbed wire, because we don’t have to assume that everyone on the other side is out to get us. Rather, in a free and open and tolerant society like the one we’re blessed to live in, it can be more like a boundary marker over which cups of sugar can be shared, and help extended in time of need. But the very goal of having a good relationship does imply two distinct parties between whom this relationship exists. As a tiny minority in this society, Jews know that the implication of erasing that boundary is the end of Judaism as we know it. Without the maintenance of boundary markers, Judaism will simply become absorbed in the large amorphous culture in which we live, with no distinct identity of its own.
What are our boundary markers? Not celebrating Christmas is an important one in our society. Not connecting with any of the rituals or symbols associated with the life or death of Jesus. More positively, sending our kids to day or supplementary Jewish school or Jewish summer camp or youth group. Any act of Jewish observance from Shabbat to festivals to celebration of the Jewish life cycle to dietary laws. Staying home from school or work on the Jewish holidays and coming to shul instead. Promoting marriage within the community, even as we extend a hand of welcome to those who have made another choice. Providing a process and a ritual of conversion to Judaism for those from the outside who are prepared to undertake that commitment and become part of the covenant. Doing tikkun olam work within a Jewish framework. Visiting and supporting our brothers and sisters in Israel. Joining a synagogue as a member. All these are ways in which we mark the boundary between us and the wider society around us; all these are ways in which we affirm the value of maintaining a distinct Jewish presence in our society. Many of you here today may zealously guard all these boundary markers, many others guard just some of them. There’s no magic formula for guaranteeing Jewish identity, but I think we can safely say that the fewer of those boundary markers which are observed, the more likely that the individual is preparing, whether consciously or not, to walk out the door. I think that’s why the Jews for Jesus touched such a raw nerve for so many in our community – they represent a blurring of a very important boundary marker for us.
But of course if sociology can describe a phenomenon, ultimately it can’t explain why people shouldn’t walk out the door. Why should we place such a premium on maintaining our separate identity? Perhaps if we lived among child-sacrificing ritual prostitution-practicing idolators like our biblical ancestors did, we would easily recognize the importance of setting up and maintaining a distinctive identity as they did. But today? Why is the existence of our group significant enough to be maintained? For the answer to that all important question, we have to turn to theology, to our faith.
What would be lost if Judaism as a faith became subsumed under some larger western religious umbrella? Many things, but I’d like to highlight two at this time: first, our adamant rejection of any intermediary between the individual and God. And second, our dogged affirmation that the world is not redeemed, and the Mashiach has not yet come.
The concept of an intermediary has long been a crucial theological difference between Judaism and Christianity. Christianity has clergy who, once ordained, can perform intercessory roles between their parishioners and God. Even more dramatically, Christianity has Jesus, the story of whose life and death provide a human channel to God and even a means of atonement for the sins of individuals who live centuries later. As you know, no such intermediaries exist in our tradition. The rabbi might have spent more time studying Jewish texts than his/her congregants, but his/her religious status vis a vis God is no closer, and there’s nothing a rabbi does that a learned congregant can’t do. And of course we have nothing in our tradition parallel to Jesus. Our greatest biblical leader, Moses, is explicitly not deified. In our tradition, it’s just the individual and God. There is no one else. That’s hard, especially at this time of year. It might be nice for us as we go through the difficult and challenging process of teshuvah (repentance) to have someone in between us and the unseen ineffable God. Someone, shall we say, effable? But that’s just not who we are, that’s not our tradition. It’s just us and God, with all the help of the tradition and the community behind us. As hard as it might be, the notion of the direct connection between the individual Jew and God is one of our distinct contributions. It is a belief that we should be proud of, one which would be lost if we were to abandon our distinct identity.
Our beliefs about the Mashiach provide another stark example of the divergent paths Judaism and Christianity have taken. Jews in the time of Jesus and ever since have looked out their windows and said, this is not what we thought of as Mashiachzeiten, the messianic era. There is still war, there is still famine, there is still environmental degradation all around us, there is still abuse of the most vulnerable among us, there are still cancer and AIDS and new plagues, there are still loneliness, depression, and despair. It’s not as if our Christian neighbours deny the existence of these things. But the Christian belief that something fundamentally changed in the world with the advent of Jesus has never been accepted by the Jews. Ironically, the wing of Lubavitch Hasidism which is focussed on the messianic identity of the late Rebbe represents from this point of view a Christianization of a segment of our community, because it revolves around the return of a dead man whose very existence changed the whole world. Mainstream Jewish belief rejects this notion and holds that the world is still decidedly unredeemed, and we are each meant to do our little part to make it better, and to repent at this season and throughout the year when we fail at this task. That hasn’t changed. God will send mashiach in God’s due time, not on our schedule. That vision of mashiach is an important Jewish teaching that would be lost without us, and certainly the Jews for Jesus model poses a threat to that distinctive Jewish approach.
Most of us don’t think so theologically about the importance of our Jewish identity – we just know that’s who we are. But when that identity is challenged, either from the outside by groups like Jews for Jesus, or from the inside, by people like Blanche who can’t make the connection between their spiritual lives and the tradition to which they are heir, we are forced to think about these issues and articulate just what we’re about.
In some ways, developments of this last year have helped us shore up our Jewish consciousness and identity. First, the Jews for Jesus campaign itself has put boundary issues under the spotlight. Second, the publicity about the upcoming Mel Gibson film “The Passion” has put us on the alert that the old issues in Jewish-Christian relations are not quite all ironed out yet, and some in the Christian world still derive strength from an account of Jesus’ life which blames the Jews for his death. While we hope that the impact of this film here and abroad will be minimal, the discussion of the film has served to remind us of who we are.
Third, the remarks of Bishop Henry of Calgary and some other Christian leaders about the same-sex marriage debate in the House of Commons and the responsibility they see for Christian politicians to make public policy in accordance with the teachings of the church, has prompted many Jews to write and speak publicly about the importance to religious minorities of keeping church and state separate. No matter how individuals among us may feel about same-sex marriage, and I am quite sure there is a diversity of opinion present in this room, I don’t think any of us would want our politicians to make their decisions based on threats from priests or ministers that they would burn in hell if they voted a certain way. Too many of our ancestors were threatened with a similar fate by Bishop Henry’s clerical forebears just for holding on to their Jewish faith, for us to feel comfortable with this kind of discourse in our shared public space.
So the Jews for Jesus, Mel Gibson, and Bishop Henry may help heighten our awareness of our distinct Jewish identity in this society. But obviously not all our Christian neighbours are of this ilk. Thank God, many of our Christian friends have denounced all three. We are blessed to have in Canada many supportive and respectful Christian friends and countrymen. It is of course in regard to these wonderful neighbours, co-workers, family members, that we find it hardest to keep the identity markers straight. How do we maintain the good and close relationships with them that we desire, while holding on to who we are as Jews? That is our challenge.
For in a way, the Blanches of the world worry me more than the Adams. For every Adam who goes and gets baptized, I believe that there are 100 Blanches who just slowly assimilate away. For with time, the schools and law firms and golf clubs which didn’t admit Jews in Blanche’s time virtually all opened their doors to Jews. And that was a good thing, because it signalled a waning anti-Semitism in this society, and we’re all for that. Nobody wants opportunities for themselves or their children to be restricted.
But with those externally imposed barriers down, how much yiddishkeit did Blanche really have to fall back on? Precious little. Adam could be engaged in spiritual conversation, because it was something he was passionate about. I have a fantasy that maybe one day he would find his way back to his Jewish roots. Blanche, I’m not so sure. Do the Blanches of the Jewish world have enough spiritual and communal resources to maintain their distinctive Jewish identity in the midst of an attractive and increasingly open society? Her anxiety at Rosh Hashanah time is, paradoxically, a good sign, because that’s what we should be feeling at this time of year according to our tradition. So as she worried, she was right in there, doing the traditional thing for Jews. Oh, if only worrying were enough, we’d be in fine shape as a people! But in order to maintain our distinct identity, we of course need more than worrying: we need dancing too (at Simhat Torah), learning too (of Hebrew language and Jewish texts), praying too (with connection to the traditional Jewish liturgy and in a way that touches the spirit), observing too (mitzvot like sukkah and lulav and tefillin), doing too (the work of Tikkun Olam in a Jewish context, and political activism on behalf of Israel and other causes we derive from our Jewish values) and teaching too (of Jewish tradition to the next generation). All these things together, or whatever combination of them individuals among us attain, are going to be what sustain us as a people over the next century.
A voice calls to us at this time of year, and we listen. And we tremble. And we think about where we are as Jews and as human beings. We think about our aspirations, our achievements, our failures, our strengths, our weaknesses. We do so in the context of the Jewish community. We endeavour to find points of connection between our genuine individual spiritual impulses, and the liturgy which our ancestors have bequeathed us. We endeavour to find and preserve those boundary markers which will help us safeguard who we are as Jews in the midst of a wider society which sometimes attracts, sometimes repulses, always has the power to overwhelm. We endeavour to find the right balance between our own needs as individuals and the call of community and tradition and God. We trust that God will be with us all the way to help us do the right thing, because God forgives us no matter how far we’ve strayed.
Summer is giving way to fall. The thin sliver of the Tishrei moon is beginning to appear in the sky. The children of Israel in all their habitations are gathering to pray. The shofar is sounded. Rosh Hashanah brings its challenge, and its message of hope.
L’shana Tova tikatevu.