Rabbi Bruce Dollin – HEA Denver

The first line of the parasha: “V’yehi ba’yom hashemini, karah moshe laaharon ulvanav, ul’ziknei yisrael, “On the eight day, Moses called to Aaron and his sons, and to the Elders of Israel.” Then Moses goes on to talk about the specific sacrifices that Aaron and his sons will make in the Tabernacle.

The question arises as to why Moses speaks to the Elders of Israel at all when they do not have a part to play in the sacrificial system. Sacrifices are limited to Aaron and his sons. Rashi tries to answer the question by saying that Moses calls to the Elders at the same time he speaks to the Priests, to show the people that the Elders have their own authority and that their authority comes “al pi hadibur” a phrase we read in the Haggadah which means by the word of God. The authority of the Elders, who are the leaders of the people of Israel, comes from God.

The Midrash weighs in on this question by saying, “Beloved are the Elders, and if they are young, their youth is secondary to them.” Now this is interesting. According to the Midrash, to be an elder doesn’t necessarily mean that one is old. It has more to do with one’s wisdom and leadership ability. So even if a quote “Elder” is actually young, it is as if his youth is secondary. He must be wise beyond his years. Which is pretty rare, but I guess possible.

But even that seems odd. We read in another Midrash that in regards to a young leader, specifically a leader of the Jewish people, that ‘God ages them quickly.” Now we are getting somewhere.

Young leaders do age quickly. When I first came out of the Seminary 25 years ago, and became the Rabbi of a small suburban synagogue in the New York metropolitan area, I likened it to a person running as fast as he could and then crashing into a brick wall. At 18 years old I went to college for 4 years and then I continued on immediately to rabbinical school for 6 years. The last time I had lived in the suburbs was when I was a teenager. I had no clue what I was going to find there and I did most everything wrong. One of my friends once said that you go to a small congregation right after you are ordained, make all of your mistakes, and then leave town.

Leadership ages you quickly. I came to the Alliance 18 years ago and I had to direct a congregation to integrate women fully into the davenning, move the congregation across town, raise funds for and then build a new building and chart a course for the future of the congregation. We were amazingly successful. But it took its toll on me and on all of the staff who worked with me in the effort. It is hard to meet the expectations of a rapidly growing community when virtually every individual in the congregation has a different set of expectations of you. It was a steep learning curve and every gray hair on my head today can be traced back to this or that crises.

It strikes me having just returned from my 4 month long sabbatical, what the pressure of the workload here is really like. Before the sabbatical I knew I was tired but I had become so accustomed to the workload that I didn’t really notice it. Well I noticed it this week big time, my 1st week back, and I find it astounding. Rabbi Gruenwald got a pretty good dose of it too in the last 4 months and he did an amazing job. I am very proud of him and grateful for the enormous effort he put forth to hold everything together in my absence. And to the rest of the staff who stepped up to do the extra work: they deserve all of our gratitude.

But don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining about the workload. It is a privilege to serve this congregation. And along with the pressure, comes an unbelievable amount of fun and humor and collegiality. It’s fun to be a rabbi and to work with people and for people you like and respect. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Rabbi Akiva in the Talmud says: “Israel are compared to birds. Just as birds cannot fly without wings, so too, Israel cannot exist without their elders.” I know rabbis are critical in charting the direction of the community. It’s hard work and often under appreciated but what an honor and how satisfying it is! With an engaged community and good leaders: Israel can do more than just fly. It can soar.

So I was very grateful to have the past 4 months both to rest, but also to take a look around the country to see what other rabbis were doing with their communities. I visited 20 different places, all of which were doing interesting, different, innovative work. I watched other rabbis work their magic both for the congregation and for me, who for once was simply a participant. I could see how these rabbis commanded respect from their communities but also engendered affection and love from those whom they served. The Sefat Emet, one of the latter generation of Hasidic Masters, says that the Torah uses the word “karah,” in our verse, which means: “calls,” as in Moses calls out to the elders. The word “kara” is a term of affection and endearment and love just like the ministering angels call out to one another affectionately in the “keshusha” when we read “v’kara ze el ze v’amar.”

Rabbis, just like any teacher I guess, touch peoples’ hearts in ways that they may never know. Our work is a working of the heart.

I want to talk briefly about that; rabbis touching the hearts of those they lead. I want to talk about it because it’s that work which is really God’s work. It’s Holy work and it can make the greatest difference in people’s lives. But my friends, work of the heart is also a very dangerous business. It’s just plain dangerous.

Moses calls unto Aaron and his sons to make the sacrifices on behalf of the People. You have to be very precise when you are a High Priest at the alter in the Tabernacle of the People of Israel. In our parasha, we read the story of Aarons sons, Nadav and Avihu, who offered up an “aish zara,” a strange sacrifice, a strange fire, which God had not commanded them to offer up. And then an even stranger fire came down from heaven and burned Nadav and Avihu to ashes. Aish zara: a strange fire. If you play with fire, as the saying goes, you are likely to get burned. And so it was for Nadav and Avihu.

Fire is an interesting substance. We need fire to stay warm. We need fire to cook our food. We need fire for light. The anthropologists tell us that once human beings discovered fire, their families and communities advanced at an exponential rate. We need fire to live. But we know something else about fire. If you come too close to it, it can consume you. And for the sons of Aaron, it consumed them. And Aaron understood the risk his sons were taking in the Tabernacle, as we read that despite the tragedy of losing his sons, “v’yidom Aharon.” Aaron was silent. He knew the risks and silently endured the consequences.

All leaders play with fire. Because leaders interact, touch, challenge, and sometimes inflame the hearts of those they lead. And it’s a dangerous business because to inflame hearts, means creating fire that can transform a person to a live a deeper, more meaningful and more satisfying life, but it can also consume them and consume the leaders with them.

In college I wrote a paper that I still remember. It talked about what the Greeks called “the daimonic.” The daimonic is the life force. It is the force within us that pushes us to live and to live deeply, with passion and vitality. I studied Freud during my college years and Freud would probably call the daimonic, the Id. Both for the Greeks and for Freud, it is the daimonic that generates all the energy in a human being. It’s the powerhouse. It pushes us to live deeply. If you don’t access the daimonic, you may be breathing, but you are not really alive.

If we can access that power within us, our lives will simply be fuller, more vital, deeper and richer.

And good leaders push their people to access that place. Judaism believes that place contains the spark of God. It’s a dangerous place for all the raw power it contains: even the Greeks knew that: from the word daimonic comes the word “demon.” Nadav and Avihu entered this realm sloppily and they were consumed by its energy. But if you don’t access that place at all: life becomes tedious, monotonous, colorless …you don’t really get anywhere. There is no movement: there is no life.

One of the most creative rabbis in the country today: Rabbi Sharon Braus, told me that in everything Jewish that we do in our lives but particularly in shul during the davenning, we must be challenged: we must be made to be a bit uncomfortable. People don’t like to be made uncomfortable and it is not rare in her rabbinate and I can say the same for my rabbinate as well, people often lash out at the Rabbi from a place of anxiety, caused, I guess, by the Rabbi. Never the less, as the saying goes, rabbis should comfort those in pain, but discomfit those who are a little too comfortable. In my rabbinate in the past few years, I think I’ve shied away from making people uncomfortable, in engaging in Jewish issues and problems that should have been and should still be presented and aired and examined. I think I have been too complacent in my rabbinate in this way: not pushing and probing into the places of the heart. I hope to change that. One of the more innovative rabbis interviewed in Rabbi Hayim Herring’s new book about rabbis and synagogue life said, “If it ain’t broke, then break it.” Interesting concept. But it probably is broke: we just don’t notice.

There is a lot more to be said on the subject. I am preparing a report that I will put online in my blog that speaks about what I saw and what my reaction to it was. I hope it opens a conversation among all of us here how we are going to meet the tremendous challenges that face Jews and all the synagogues around the country that wish to continue to serve the community. I can assure you that in 20 years, this synagogue will look very different than it looks today. We have been doing quite well during the past 18 years of my tenure. But the next 18 are going to have to be different because simply put, the community is changing: and it’s changing faster than ever. I can tell you that it is a perilous time in the American Jewish community, especially for synagogues. But what time has not been perilous for Jews in this world? I assure you, as well, we are more than up to the challenge we face as long as we recognize it for the challenge it is.

As Rabbi Akiba says, “a bird cannot fly without wings, just as Israel cannot survive without its leaders.” Let’s make sure, together, that this congregation and the entire Jewish community will continue to soar into the future as it has in the past. We have to leave for our descendants something beautiful just as our ancestors left something beautiful for us.

It’s hard to be the little guy all the time. I hope you can feel some of my pain. There is research that says that tall men have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. Most US Presidents were tall men. Check this out. Abe Lincoln, the tallest President in history was 6ft 4. So was the “Master of the Senate,” and President, LBJ. All the rest of these men were over 6 ft: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, FDR, JFK, Ford, Reagan, HW Bush, Clinton, Obama. There is all this hype about Tim Tebow and his “davenning” after great plays. He thanks the Lord for his prowess on the field but he’s also 6 foot 3 and 236 pounds. That doesn’t hurt either. Taller is better. Bigger is better.

Unfortunately the Jewish People has always been the little guy. Think of David as he faced Goliath. Think of Isaac and Jacob, smaller and weaker than their older brothers, Ishmael and Esav. Think of Joseph, number 11 brother in a family of 12 boys. Jews, from Biblical times, always felt physically inferior to the ruling powers. Jews weren’t Egypt; they weren’t Babylonia; they weren’t Persia or Greece or Rome. Always smaller and always subjugated. It was not an easy life, to be a Jew. It’s a lot better now, but it’s still not so easy. In many ways, our good life is still subject to the will of world powers bigger than our own. That’s why we remind ourselves to be ever vigilant. The Shoah was just 65 plus years ago. In Jewish history, that is not a lot of time, so we must be ever vigilant.

We see this very concern in the Midrash. There is a particular Midrash I want to look at commenting on our parasha today.

First, the story. Jacob flees the Holy Land in fear of Esav’s wrath. On his way out of the Land, he comes upon a place. Jacob goes to sleep taking a stone as his pillow and has the famous dream of a ladder with its base on the ground, going up into the heavens. Angels are going up and down on the ladder. When Jacob awakes, he is awed by the place and calls it “Shaaar Hashamayim,” the gate of the heavens, meaning, that God and His word enter and exit the world from this place.

Understandably, then, Rashi and others see this place as none other than Mt Moriah, the future sight of the Holy Temple and that rock Jacob laid his head upon as he slept was the “Even Shtiyah,” the Foundation Stone of the Temple. The Muslims believe that they uncovered that stone on the Temple Mount, which they feature inside the “Dome of the Rock.” This, of course, just makes Jews feel even smaller because the Muslims were overlords of Jerusalem on and off, mostly on, since the 7th century and built the mosques on the Temple Mount for the first time in the year 710.

But the point is, Jacob’s stone, became the “Even Shtiyah,” the Foundation Stone of the Temple Mount and according to tradition, Jews from that time forward, had a direct line to God: “Shaar Hashamiyim:” a special gate into heaven; a gate reserved exclusively for the Jewish People.

Let’s go then, to this mysterious ladder. The text says, “and angels of God were ascending it and descending on it,” olim v’yordim bo.” Now that’s strange because if God set up this ladder, you would think that angels of God, originating in heaven, would be first descending (from heaven, down to earth) first. So it should have said, the angels are descending and only then say, ascending. Angels come down first and then go back up. But the text says it’s the opposite.
The Midrash Tanchuma compiled in the 4th century CE, retranslates the word, “melachim,” which we have been translating as angels, to another of its meanings, “messengers.’ The Midrash says these messengers were human, thus originating on earth. So they should go up, first and then descend. The Midrash says that these messengers are princes of the great powers of the world. Listen to the Midrash, “the Princes of Babylon ascended (the rungs of the ladder] seventy steps and then descended. Media, fifty two [rungs up] and [then]descended. Greece, one hundred steps [up] and descended. Edom ascended and no one knows how many.”

These are the great nations of the world, known to the authors of Midrash Tanchuma: Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. They interpret Jacobs dream, therefore, to mean that all these nations ascended in the world, and God essentially defeated them and send them back down. Except for the last one: Edom, or Rome. The authors of the Midrash were living under the cruel whip of the Roman Empire and thus they say, “Edom ascended the ladder and no one knows how many wrungs they went up.” Rome was still around. But the authors of the Midrash were hopeful and thus wrote: “Thus said the Holy One blessed be He to him [Jacob]: ‘Therefore fear not, O my servant Jacob…..neither be dismayed, Oh Israel, Even if thou sees him, so to speak, ascend and sit by Me, [after] will I bring him down. As it is stated in the prophet Ovadia [himself a descendent of Edom, by the way] “ though thou exalt thyself as an eagle [a symbol of the Roman Empire] and thou set they nest among the stars, then will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.” This is echoed by Sforno, a Italian commentator, 16th century, as he writes “Ascending and descending –indeed, ultimately, having gained ascendency, the gentile princes will go down, and the Almighty who forever stands above, will not forsake His people as He promised…”

So these great powers all ascended on the world scene and at least to the Israelites, seemed to control the whole world. But in the Jewish imagination, all these great empires with their power and arrogance would ultimately be defeated by the hand of God. Even the Roman Empire which the Jews had endured for roughly 500 years, would one day fall, according to the words of the 4th century Midrash quoting the Prophet. And of course, the Prophet was right. Rome did fall and the Jews remained.

Jewish sacred literature? The Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash. What is generated in these sacred texts is an image of a People, though physically tiny compared to the nations, has an outsized role in the workings of the world. According to the Jewish imagination, we are a Chosen People. Special and distinct. We were little, but we had a direct line to God and it was God alone who would see to our ultimate survival and even triumph.

Now I guess that makes sense. The little guy pretending in his sacred literature, to be big and important.

But here is the thing. We did survive, in fact, as all those other massive empires fell. You may be familiar with what Mark Twain once wrote about the Jews as he witnessed the rise of Zionism around the turn of the century. He wrote: “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then . . . passed away. The Greek and the Roman followed. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts. … All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

The secret of his immortality? Perhaps our parasha today with its mysteries points to the mystery of the survival of our People. Perhaps Jacob’s stone was the “Even Shtiyah,” the Foundation Stone of the Holy Temple. God says to Jacob in that dream, “I am the Lord, God of Abraham and your father and the God of Isaac; the ground upon which you are lying, to you will I give it and to your descendants. Your offspring shall be as the dust of the earth, and you shall spread out powerfully westward, eastward northward and southward; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your offspring.”

Look: it’s not so great to always be the little guy. But then again……..

We might well worry about our origins. Our tradition makes a strong point that we are a People that believes in God and that that relationship with God goes back to our ancestor Abraham. So what we think of Abraham and his son Isaac and his son Jacob and so on, is very important to how we see ourselves.

The Rabbis in the Midrash understood this as well and tried to portray Abraham as essentially, a perfect human being who passed all the tests (there were ten of them) that God set for him and therefore, was worthy of being the father of our People.

When we ask God to show mercy upon us, we often invoke the name of Abraham, God’s loyal servant, as if to say, we might not be worthy ourselves, but be kind to us, Lord, because You admired our ancestors: particularly, Abraham.

It is important, to us, therefore, needless to say, that Abraham be a noble figure. The problem is, with all due respect to the Rabbis, he’s not so noble….at least not always.

Let’s start with how he treats his father, Terach. This doesn’t get much attention from us, virtually no attention from the Midrash, but it was Terach, not Abraham, who started the family trek to the Holy Land. Here it is just before our parasha this morning in chapter 11: :Now these are the chronicles of Terach. Terach begot Avram, Nahor and Haran….Terach took his son Avram and Lot, the son of Haran….and Sarai…and … departed with them from Ur Kasdim to go to the land of Canaan.” It was actually Terach who began the trek to the Promised Land.

Not so bad…..we will come back to this in a moment.

But how does his son treat him? Abraham apparently abhorred his father’s understanding of the world. According to the Midrash, Abraham, one day, started smashing his father’s idols. The Midrash sees this as a meritorious act on the part of Abraham, but I wonder. Smashing up your father’s idols? This is the same Abraham who defends the lives of those in Sodom and Gemorrah whose acts of sexual depravity and violence were far worse than making some stick figures from stone and wood. And the Rabbis who created this legend were well aware of the 5th commandment: Honor your father and mother. Abraham did not. Most everyone then worshipped idols; Abraham could have distinguished himself from idol worshippers in a way a bit less dramatic and no doubt hurtful to his father.

We wonder about Abraham, especially in the parasha today in which Abraham seems willing to give his wife up to the Pharaoh to save his own life. The Rabbis avoid this story, as well, as it cast aspersions upon Abraham’s character.

And of course, Abraham kicks Ishmael and Hagar out of his household because his second wife, Sarah, objects to their being there. And then God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac up on the alter and Abraham is willing to do it; he goes so far as to lift the knife to slaughter the child, before God stops him.

From the text itself, it is hard to conclude the Abraham was a completely righteous man in his dealings with his father and with his sons.

In the personal family relationships, that we see in the Torah, there is always some degree of dysfunction. Always something going awry. It starts with Abraham and his father and sons. But it doesn’t end there –really, it never ends at all in Biblical history. Beginning with Cain killing Abel, to Abraham with wives and sons, to Isaac with his wife Rebecca and his sons, Jacob and Esav; Joseph and his brother: Joseph sold into slavery. And don’t even ask about the kings of Israel with their families especially David with the wife of another man and his other wives and rebellious sons. It isn’t pretty. In most cases, the dysfunction leads to heartache as best, tragedy at worst.

The Bible does not shy away from any of this. Biblical characters are portrayed with all of their character flaws. They, like us, are an amalgam of good intentions and wayward behavior. And their family relationships are marked with love and pride and concern, but also, pettiness, jealousy, and hatred.

Not a few modern scholars, Aviva Zornberg among them, study the dysfunction of the Biblical families to learn something deeper about us. That is the brilliance of the Biblical narrative. The characters are all too human –just like us.

But just like us, there is still a nobility in them that seems to drive them to better things. Let’s go back to Terach for a moment. Here is an idolater: ancient, morally primitive; he doesn’t yet see the truth of the One God that his son will soon see. But he is on his way to the Promised Land none the less (not even yet promised) to make things better. He is already on the move to improve the spiritual condition of his family. So much so, that his son Abraham (perhaps learning from him?) was able to see something that no one else in the world could see, that is God calling out to him to become the father of a great nation that would go on to change the world.

Terach is already moving; taking concrete steps to improve the world. And Abraham, for all his flaws, is doing so as well. Going from Charan to Canaan. Raising a son and providing a wife for Isaac; buying land in the Israel Holy for his wife’s grave to cement a connection between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel for all time. And Jacob and his sons? Doing what was necessary to survive as a family so that one day they could become a great nation. And Moses leading a broken people through the desert, first to Sinai and then to the Promised Land. Always moving forward: always moving the People of Israel and perhaps even the people in the world, a bit closer to God and His Ways.

There isn’t a story in the Bible in which the flaws of the characters are hidden and the dysfunction in the families apparent. But the families move; they bring themselves and the Jewish People forward to a better life to a life of holiness that brings holiness to the world.

The brilliance of the Bible is that the characters it portrays are just like us. Flawed, wounded and broken. But these characters don’t give up. They progress in their lives like we hope to. Terach should be seen by us as a hero. In a world full of spiritual darkness, he picks up his family and moves them just a little closer to what will become a nation, intended to be one day, a light unto the nations. He didn’t have God’s call to guide him or inspire him. The progress he made had to come from him alone. And he did what was necessary to “beget” a son who would grow up one day to hear God’s call and change the world forever.

The characters in the Bible do not save the world. Their job, like our job, is to move the world a little closer to being saved. Small steps, moving in the right direction. That is all we should hope to do. And according to the Bible, that is what we were created to do.

Dear Friends,

On December 18th, I will begin my sabbatical of 4 months. I will return just after Pesach on April 17. This will be my first experience in 25 years in the pulpit in which I will disengage from my work and explore some new things. I have already set aside the sacred texts I intend to study, a dozen or so books to read and some synagogues I will visit in New York and in Los Angeles. I will also attend a rabbinic training institute in January and most likely, the AIPAC Policy Conference in March.

Those in the helping professions often report a lack of balance in their lives. The stress of work as well as the distress of their patients, clients, and congregants, can be overwhelming and sometimes debilitating. “Burnout,” is not unusual in our professions. There are numerous studies which explore this problem and quite a lot written on “self-care” for clergy. Younger rabbis (as I once was) have great resiliency in tolerating the stress of the job. Older rabbis (as I am now) have to be more careful. I will be exploring this on my sabbatical as well.

For my sabbatical to be successful, I will have to take a complete leave from my duties as your rabbi. As much as I might like to believe otherwise, our congregation will do just fine without me for four months. Rabbi Gruenwald, Cantor Goldstein and Neal Price will do a great job taking care of all the needs of the community that arise. Please do not hesitate to call them for anything at all. A great resource in finding the right staff professional to address any issue is my assistant, Joyce Perlmutter. Call her during regular business hours and she will get you the help you need right away.

For emergencies during evenings, weekends, Shabbat and Holidays, Neal Price is available and will be able to get word to clergy.

As always, if you know of someone who needs help, call the shul even if you think we already know. Our clergy are more than happy to get two or three or even a dozen phone calls about someone in need. They can’t be helpful if they don’t have the information. We ask you to be the “eyes and ears” of the community.

The HEA office number is 303-758-9400

I am most grateful for the opportunity to take a sabbatical. I expect to return to my duties refreshed and inspired in the spring. I wish you only good health and success during these winter months. See you soon.

B’shalom,

Rabbi Bruce Dollin

Are you hurting right now, I am. This fasting. It’s crazy, isn’t it. We have to sit here in shul for a million hours and our tradition mandates that we be uncomfortable pretty much the whole time.

“enita et nafshotechem,” you are to “afflict your soul.” The rabbis understand that to mean fasting. I have to be honest. I don’t feel like I am afflicting my soul today: I am, however, doing a job on my body.

What’s this about? What gain is there in this pain?

Well, here’s what I think. I think this fasting business is really just a test. We are testing ourselves. We are proving to ourselves that we control our bodies. Our bodies do not control us. We have powerful desires in our bodies. We have the same instinctual needs, overwhelming physical drives, —no different from any other animal that walks on earth. What makes us different is we have, at least, some conscious control over what we let our bodies do.

I know you are supposed to be able to train your dog. We can’t train our dog. Our dog will jump up on the counter and eat whatever food is on the counter. We catch our dog in the act. We yell at her. We look her in the eyes and say “no.” We drag her outside and shut the door and she starts to whine. We’ve done this every time for 8 years. This dog has a sensitive stomach. When she eats people food, she gets sick. When she eats counter food, nothing at all goes well for her. And yet, she will jump up there and eat counter food every chance she gets. We do not control this dog. This dog doesn’t control this dog.

Presumably, we are a higher order of being than our dogs. Presumably, we direct what our bodies do, when we are behaving well. But this is Yom Kippur and it is apparent to us that we don’t always behave well. We ask God for forgiveness today because we know that all too often, we do not behave well.

Ok, a confession of my sins to you all right now. Please don’t tell anybody about this: just between you and me. Tammy and I have succumbed to watching a bit of TV in the evenings. And I know, I have stood here for years, expounding on the evils of TV. It is evil. But Tammy and I have two kids in college, now, and two high schoolers at home and they don’t need help with their homework and they talk a lot to their friends; and they put themselves to bed when they are tired. Tammy and I look at each other after dinner. “What are we supposed to do, now?” So, like every other good American, we ordered Netflix Streaming. Truly. A sin.

But nothing like the sins we see in the programs that we stream into our living room, on our TV. Netflix lets us watch shows from previous seasons so we watch Mad Men. It keeps winning all the Emmy Awards so we thought we’d watch it from the beginning. Oh my God! Set in 1960: the first season second episode: this is what the characters do in that one 45 minute episode. Chain smoking, drinking liquor in the office, at lunch: all day long. Adultery, (which seems to be the most popular sin in this series), racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual harassment, broken confidences; gossip, child abuse. In this same episode, the main character’s kid is running around in the house during a party and the neighbor grabs the kid and slaps him across the face: smack! He says, “no running in the house young man.” And then the kid’s father who sees this whole thing, including the slap across the face, comes up and grabs the kid himself and says to him: “Yah…., no running in the house or you’ll get more of the same from me.” Slap across the face. Wow. And oh yes, same episode, bad driving. The long suffering wife of the main character runs the car onto the neighbor’s lawn. The kids, of course, are standing on the back seat, and they go flying. No one dies or that wouldn’t be any fun.

These people are out of control. How did we ever survive the 60’s? One episode: misbehaving in just about every way. Tammy and I; we go tsk, tsk, tsk, my goodness and then, of course, we can’t wait to click on episode three.

We fast today to prove to ourselves that we do have some control over what we do and therefore our bad behavior is our fault. The great luminary, Rav Avraham Isaac Kook says the following: “The foundation for “teshuvah,” [repentence]…is [the person’s] recognition of responsibility for his actions, which derives from man’s free will. [The person] must acknowledge that no other cause is to be blamed for his misdeed and its consequences but himself, alone” ( Lights of Penitence).

We have free will. And we should be able to control ourselves.

You know, when I was younger, I had no problem with Rav Kook. When you’re younger, it’s just easier to be judgmental and see how everybody else just doesn’t measure up. Rav Kook says that when we sin, we have no one else to blame but ourselves. I guess I have a little more rachmanis on people than that, now. We have to bear the consequences of our behavior, but I am not so sure anymore that what we do is entirely our fault.

I have been doing a lot of reading recently in neuroscience. It’s fascinating stuff. David Eaglemen in his new book “Incognito,” explores the literature in this growing field and tries to figure out from a neuroscientific point of view, why people do what they do. And more specifically, why people do the bad things that they do.

Here is what he says. Our bodies are driven to seek satisfaction and pleasure: food, sex, lots of material things to entertain us. That’s what our bodies want.

But then there is our brain. A very complicated, three pounds of flesh. The most highly evolved part of our brain, the cerebral cortex, is the seat of what the scientists call our “Executive Function.” This is where we think. It’s where we can imagine the future; where we can step back from our emotions and drives and evaluate them, delay them, control them based on what we think is best for us and best for others, for the long term. We fast today to show ourselves that the Executive Function of our brains is working ok.
Executive function is good. It makes us human: its absence is what my dog so dumb.

But there is a problem, here. The problem is… there are a lot of things that undermine the effectiveness of “Executive Function.” Lots of things undermine it.

Eagleman gives a few examples. Like being a teenager!

Neuroscientists now know that the frontal lobes of teenage brains are not fully developed. That is why they often surprise us and themselves with impulsivity. If you don’t believe me, check out their Facebook Pages: scary. Why would anybody put this stuff up for the world to see. I tell my kids that before you hit “post,” assume the college admissions officer is watching: because, actually, he is. For kids, emotional response comes first and it comes strong and sometimes they act without thinking! By the way, I advise all of you to do the same. My rule of thumb for email? I don’t push “send” if I wouldn’t want that email to be presented as an agenda item at a meeting of the HEA Board of Directors. It just makes me more careful. I am going to come back to this, in a moment.

So Executive Function. There are other things in the brain that mess this up as well, say the neuroscientists. Like brain chemistry. There is plenty of debate about this, but we should at least think about it. This guy Jared Lee Loghner who shot Congresswoman, Gabby Giffords. He had been acting very strangely beforehand and he had no apparent reason for wanting to hurt anybody. Mental illness? The same with the Virginia Tech shooter in 2007; he killed 32 people with no apparent reason. He had been previously diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder. Neurotransmitters in the brain that can screw things up. Some people don’t see this as an excuse for bad behavior. But ask anybody who has a mood disorder. They will tell that it is hard for them to control the irrational thoughts that go through their minds; thinking that can lead them to say or do things that they regret later. Sometimes the brain just doesn’t work exactly right.
Executive Function undermined. Here’s another reason. Genetics.

They say that if you are a carrier of this particular set of genes, you are ten times more likely to commit murder or some form of aggravated assault, than those who do not carry these genes. You are 15 times more likely to commit armed robbery and 40 times more likely to commit sexual assault. These genes form along the Y Chromosome. “If you are a carrier of these genes, we call you a male” (Eagleman). You are just more likely to do bad things if you are a man.

Our brains can undermine our proper behavior and make us do things that are not good for us. As Carl Jung once said, “In each of us, there is another whom we don’t know.” And if you don’t believe Carl Jung, here’s Pink Floyd: “There’s someone in my head that’s not me.” Sometimes that’s true.

But the problem doesn’t always come from our brains. Our environment can mess up Executive Function as well. .
Some of you may have noticed I lost about 20 pounds over the last several months. When I started to eat less, I became aware of how everything around me that conspired to make me eat more. Go to a restaurant and look at the size of the plates which hold portions double, even triple what your body needs at any one meal. Have you heard of the famous popcorn study? They gave a group of movie goers, each a large bucket of popcorn, way more than they could eat. And they gave another group, a super size bucket of popcorn. The people with the super size on average at 150 calories more than those with just the large bucket. This was about 25 more handfuls of popcorn. Size of the buckets! Cornell University Professor, Brian Wansink, tests eating behavior. He says in his book: “Mindless Eating,” that he can manipulate how much people eat in restaurant by altering plate size, lighting, tone of voice of the waiter, the label on the wine bottle (even if the wine is otherwise, awful). He can manipulate you, into eating more –much, much more and you will never know it. He’s done it hundreds of times.

Martin Lindstrom is a big whig in the advertising world. He just wrote his second tell-all book called “Brandwashing.” His first book was called “Buyology.” He writes about the tricks he has used to get consumers to buy almost any product. The industry is now using MRI Brain Imaging technology. They hook you up and then show you pictures of this or that ad and watch what your brain does. If the ad stimulates your brain’s pleasure centers, they got you. We are not conscious of any of this. Advertisers are by-passing us and advertising directly to our brains.
So with all of this, I begin to wonder, is it me making these choices? Are we the ones in control? We can be so easily misled by our own brains?. We can be so easily misled by the environment in which we live? We can be so easily manipulated by others to do things that they want us to do but that are often bad for us, and even hurtful to others? So when Rav Kook says “that a person must acknowledge that no other cause is to be blamed for his misdeed? We now know that that is simply not true.

Now you know me. I don’t excuse bad behavior. Just ask my kids. But knowing what we do about all the things that can trip us up, shouldn’t we have a little rachmanis on each other? God has two attributes, according to tradition. Midat hadin, justice: which demands right behavior from us. Strict and unbending. And downright scary, actually. But he also has Middat harachamim: an attribute of mercy: compassion, and understanding. Today we stand before God and ask him for His mercy. Because we know, that without His mercy, we won’t make it past His test. Should we then not also show some compassion and some understanding for others as well? We are flawed. We are weak, we are vulnerable to bad influences from within and without. What if we just admit from the outset that we do bad things for a whole lot of reasons, some even beyond our control? We do bad things –bad for us and bad for others. We think we are in control, and we aren’t, exactly. We need some help. We need some support. We can’t do this alone.

To my mind, that is what we are doing right now, sitting here together. We fast on Yom Kippur. You all know that fasting on Yom Kippur is not that big a deal. It hurts, but most 10 years old can do it pretty well. The fact that we fast on Yom Kippur is not really the point. The point is, we are fasting on Yom Kippur, together: in front of each other; in public. Everybody can see what we are doing. We are engaged with the community in pledging to do the right thing. We confess our bad behavior to each other, in a sense. We submit our behavior to the community: and in so doing, we receive its help.

The most haunting figure in literature: is Rofion Raskolnikov, in Doestoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Raskolnikoff. A poor student, completely alone and isolated in his little run down apartment. He is a deep thinker. A moralist. And after a painful and tedious and careful and solitary progression of one thought after the next, he concludes that the murder of an unscrupulous money lender is somehow just. So he sneaks into her house and bashes her head in with an ax. The point? He was alone –there was no one there to say, “Raskolnikov. Your thinking is crazy. It doesn’t make sense. It is wrong.”

You are here on Yom Kippur, not because you are seeking some kind of mystical communion with God. You could do that on a mountaintop. Do it anywhere. You are here because of the person sitting next to you. You are here to make it clear to yourself that you are not alone; you live in a religious community that has expectations of you. That person sitting next to you is here to challenge you to do the right thing and pressure you, in a sense, to avoid the wrong thing. We are helping each other. What we are doing, in Hebrew is called “tochecha,” rebuke. We read in Leviticus “you shall not hate your brother, you shall rebuke him …” and not allow him to sin.” If you are a genuine friend of somebody and you see him going astray, straying from the very set of moral precepts that you hold and you know, in his finer moments, he holds as well, then it is your obligation to rebuke him. You have to tell him that he is screwing up. If you don’t, according to the Torah, it is as if you hate him.

Ok, there are just a few more things I want to say about this.

You might say to me. So why do we need a religious community to support us in this work? Our society, our secular community, our secular laws, encourage us to do the right thing; we don’t need religion. Well yes: but mostly no. Societal norms do not go far enough. In his book, “American Grace,” Harvard Professor, Robert Putnam, found that people who call themselves religious by being involved in a church or synagogue, give more charity, 4 times more charity, than people who call themselves non-religious. And he tried to find out why. Was it a spiritual communion with the Almighty that transformed the soul into generosity? Perhaps is was something deeply spiritual that encouraged people to give more? No. It was because the guy sitting next to him in church gave charity. It was the communal norm based on religious tradition, but it was the communal norm. You go the church, or synagogue and everyone is giving charity, you give charity.

It’s about the guy sitting next you in the synagogue.

So you say to me, “what about avoiding the bad things? Secular law again. It sets the standards and if you break them, you get in trouble. If it’s bad enough , you go to jail. Why do we need the synagogue? Why do we need Judaism?

Well, let’s take a look at what you are confessing to this morning right there in your Machzor. Take a look at the Ashamnu prayer. And note that we say these out loud so that everyone around us can hear us saying it. We abuse, we betray, we are cruel, we destroy, we embitter, we falsify, we gossip, we hate, we insult, we jeer,….we mock, we neglect, we oppress, we pervert, we quarrel, we rebel, we are unkind, we are wicked….. Just so you know: all these things I just mentioned are perfectly legal in America. But we know they are wrong as we say them this morning. Al Chet: for the sin we have committed before you by neglect, philandering, deceit, sloppy speech, scorning parents, foolish talk, denial, deceit, cynicism, condescension, impulsiveness, gossip, betraying trust. Again, all legal in America. But if you commit these sins, you know they will destroy your life. You don’t learn about these sins out in the world. The world doesn’t care about these sins. You learn them in here. And you express them out loud, for you yourself to hear and to let everyone around you know that you take them seriously. Your pledge to avoid sin is a public pledge, and with the full expectation that those sitting next to you will hold you to it.

I told you I’d come back to this and here we are. It’s like those emails. You don’t send anything in an email, that you don’t want everybody to see. Just the same with moral behavior, especially with sin. And I know we all fall way short of this. But the concept can be helpful. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t be proud to share with the person sitting next to you, to your left and to your right. Don’t do anything you couldn’t justify to the people you care about the most, and the people who care about you. That’s why we are here in shul today, together. That’s why we say the Ashamnu and Al Chet out loud for all us to hear.

Look, these guys on Mad Men: their community both at work and at home, simply disregard the most important values we hold in our faith. No one on the show stands toe to toe with anybody and says, “ you know what, that’ just not ok.”

Rav Kook says that we must acknowledge that no other cause is to be blamed for our sins.” That’s not true. There are a lot of causes. Our brains, our environment –all kinds of things that lead us astray. But there is something that is in our control. What we are doing right now. We are here: we are enlisting the help and support of our faith community. In this community, we will name sin for what it is. We will say those sins out loud for us all to hear; we will say them in front of the people we care most about in our world. And we will pledge, out load, in a very public way, that we will not commit these sins in the future.

So many things are beyond our control. But there is one choice that you can make that is very much in your control. It’s the choice you made this morning. It’s your choice to be here.

Rabbi Bruce Dollin

We take snapshots of our lives. How many of you have one of these? I am holding a digital camera. Most of you either have one of these or there is one of these on your phone and you might not even know it.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were careful how many photographs we snapped. Remember, we had Kodak rolls of film: 24 pictures or 36 pictures and the film was expensive, and developing it was even more expensive. And it took a week or so to get your pictures back.
Well now, with one of these, you can take a hundred pictures in a minute and download them to your computer; start looking at them seconds later.

Amazing, isn’t it? The problem is: you can take a hundred pictures in a minute, which means you end up with thousands of them. It would take me days to go through all of these pictures I have on my computer. So, of course, I just leave them. Never look at them.
But, if you are lucky like me, you have a spouse like Tammy. She goes through all the old print pictures and the ones on the computer. She picks out the good ones and puts them in an album. We have about a dozen of these albums on our shelf. They are great to look at. They tell the story of our family.

Here’s a picture I found in one of those albums. Dollin family on the couch. There is Tammy, with her arm around Shai (4 years old), Kivi in the middle, 2 years old holding a teddy bear, Yoni (6) next to him with Vivi a few months old, on his lap.
But behind us……behind us, our Moms are there. But right next to them, are our two Dads, standing right there. Our Dads, may their memories be a blessing.

I saw that picture in the album and flood of snapshots came into my mind. Snapshots of an album of me, not on the page, but in my mind. Now Tammy pregnant with Yoni. Now Bruce and Tammy under the chuppah. Then a young perplexed rabbi in his first pulpit. A way too serious student at Seminary, New York. Then a young man in college, California. High School, The Albuquerque Academy, hot shot prep school.
But now, I go back further in my mind. Now in my mind, there is a little kid in his father’s paint store. Mary Carter Paint. I remember this store like it was yesterday: I see it: I can even smell the store, even the soap in the bathroom: it was called pumice, to scrape the paint off your hands. I am looking at my father: he’s big, very strong. This is what he used to do as I watched him there. He takes a gallon of house paint, pops open the top, puts it under tinting machine, turns the machine to the right until he gets the right color. Pulls a lever down, squirts the tint down into the can. Puts the cover back on, the rubber mallet, hits the rim all around, bang, bang, bang. Always three times. Into the shaker machine. Now stay back, he would say every time, this thing’s dangerous. It will hit you in the head. Takes the paint can out of the shaker machine, gives it to the lady, thank you so much for your business, please come back soon.

I saw this a hundred times. Pop the top, tint; bang the rim, three times. Shaker machine, please come back, ma’am, to see us soon,, you hear?.

One day in that store. I was chosen. Chosen, by my father. Here’s what happened. Dad brought me into the office in the store. He closed the door. The workers couldn’t hear or see us. This was the inner sanctum: an important and magical place where my dad did important and magical things. He said: “Bruce, you are going to say a prayer tonight at dinner. So repeat after me: borei (borei), peri (peri), ha gafen (ha gafen). Again. Borei, (borei), peri (peri) ha gafen (ha gafen).” He said, “do you have it? Start from the beginning. Do you have it?”

Secret words, shared just with me. Not with my mother, not with my sisters. They wouldn’t say these words at the table. These words were just for me. These words meant something special to my Dad, and now he gave them to me. I didn’t love Judaism then. But I loved my Dad and he loved Judaism. I became a Jew that day. That day, I was given a mission to be a Jew and do what Jews do.

We tell ourselves stories just like this one. We choose from a million snapshots in our minds and make an album; in our minds. These albums tell our stories. They tell a story of who we are and how we got here. But these stories do more than that. Good stories inspire us. Good stories determine the person we will become.

A psychologist at Northwestern University, named Dan McAdams studies peoples’ stories. He’s in a subspecialty called “Narrative Psychology.” He believes, that if you really want to know someone, you have to listen very carefully to the story they tell about themselves. He’s been at this for 20 years. He did an experiment once which he describes in his book called, “The Redemptive Self.” He found a group of people who you and I would call: superstars: of giving. These people are wonderful and unusual human beings. In his words, these people show an inordinate “concern for and commitment to promoting the welfare [of others].” You don’t forget a person like this. They are the great teachers, the mentors. These are the people most involved in the community, involved with their churches or synagogues. They seem to be on every committee. They are everywhere, always positive, always helping. They rarely think of themselves. If it is a good cause, especially if it helps children, the next generation, they are there, first in line to help.

Well McAdams searched these people out and he found a group of them. And he sat with each one individually and he asked them about themselves. He asked them about their personal life story. Where did they come from? What happened to them as children? How did they get to where they are today?

He asked each one in this group these questions and he was astounded by what he heard. They all came from different places. Different backgrounds and so on. But he found that they all told him, essentially, the same story. The details were different, but the story was the same. In each case, it was a story with four chapters. Here’ the story.

Chapter 1. When they were young, they felt special. They felt that they had received a particular gift that others around them didn’t have. They felt chosen, if you will. This gift however didn’t make them arrogant. They weren’t special, better; they were just special, different, and it made them grateful. It made them more sensitive to the needs of people around them that weren’t as lucky as they were. That was chapter one.

Chapter 2. They suffered. Bad things happened to them. Unexpected obstacles, challenges. Some were even victims of abuse. Bad people did bad things to them. In one way or another, life broke their hearts. This was their Chapter 2.

Chapter 3. They prevailed. From every challenge, every obstacle, they pulled through. They found the courage to go on and they did go on. They were, in a sense, in McAdam’s word, redeemed. Going from the worst of times to better times. And most often, they recounted, their courage and perseverance in life was an inspiration to others. They prevailed. They were redeemed. This was their Chapter 3.

And here’s the last chapter. The fourth part of their life story As they were able to pull through the bad times, so it was now their responsibility to help others do the same. This fourth chapter projected into the future. They now had a personal mission. It was their mission to make a positive and lasting difference in the world for their having lived in it.

McAdams was surprised. He heard the same 4 part story, told over and over again by this unique group of people. People who would be described by anyone who knew them, to be unusually kind and compassionate and giving. Their stories in four chapters: Chosenness. Suffering. Redemption. And now a lifelong responsibility to do good things and make a difference in this world.

So I ask you all: do you recognize the story? Read McAdams, and you will recognize the story.
Because it is our story. It is the story of the Jewish People. Same story, same four chapters.

The story of our people, Chapter 1: We are chosen. A special gift: a special awareness of the One God, who called our ancestor, Abraham, out of a land of spiritual chaos to go to a Promised Land. In that land, things would be different. A land where people cared about each other and were obligated to aid the poor, the orphan, and the widow. We were a fortunate People because of all the people in the world, God chose us.
Chapter Two: We suffered. We were forced from our land and were enslaved in Egypt, a land of tyranny. We were humiliated by our enemies. We returned to the Promised Land for a time, but not for very long. Two destroyed Temples, exile, dispersions, expulsions, persecutions: even genocide. Part two of our story: we suffered. And Chapter Three: We prevailed. We prevailed, mostly, because we never gave up hope. We yearned to prevail. We envisioned it. In our prayers: Oh Lord, “behold our affliction and redeem us” “Sound the great shofar to herald our freedom.” “Restore our judges as of old.” “Have mercy… and return us to Jerusalem, Your city.” For 2000 years, we recited those prayers of hope and redemption and in our own day, in our own day, we returned to that Promised Land, the Land of Israel. Part three of our story: we were redeemed from our suffering. We returned to Jerusalem. We are in Jerusalem now. We prevailed.
And Chapter 4: We now have a special and unique responsibility to the world. Israel is not just any country and the Jewish People are not just any people. In our day, Jews have attained power in the world, the likes of which we’ve never had at any time in our 3000 year history. And we must and we will use that power to bring some good to the world. It’s now our responsibility. We still have the same, ultimate, perhaps one would say, messianic goal: “L’taken olam b’malchut shadai:” to use our new power in the world, to fix it. Tikkun: to make this world fit for human beings to actually live in it. We must now be what our tradition has always hoped for us. A light unto the nations.
Choseness. Suffering. Redemption. And now, Responsibility.

It’s the story of our People. A very good People. A People with a mission.

More snapshots. My father gave me the prayer that day to say at dinner that night. My mother has a photo of me at that dinner. A little blond kid at the table, his face looking into a big picture book. On the cover of the book, it read: Passover.
I’ve seen books like that. I’ve read them to my own kids: I’ve read them to kids in our preschool.
Big colorful picture books. Pharaoh, Jewish people in rags. Sad people. Frogs, Moses with his stick, chariots, the splitting of the sea. A big bearded face in the clouds handing over the Ten Commandments.

I must have said the prayer that night. “ borei peri ha gafen.” There were sad people in the book. A wicked Pharoah, Walking through the sea. A face in the clouds; the Ten Commandments. Smiles all around: freedom. The Promised Land just ahead. We are almost there.

I ask myself this question. Perhaps you can ask this question of yourselves as well. How much of that story in the picture book with the themes of closeness, redemption and the pursuit of the Promised Land and a perfect world, is my own personal story?
The best people are the people who feel they have something unique to give. The best people are those who have suffered and somehow pulled through. The best people feel fortunate despite all that life has thrown at them. And because of this good fortune, they feel responsible to do some good for others in this world. I ask myself, is that my story? Is that our story and if it isn’t our story right now, can it become our story?
You know, I go to that shelf where Tammy has put all the picture albums of our family. I go to the last album on the shelf. The pictures in that album are already arranged nicely. They are put in their plastic covers, the captions are there. I am not going to change those pages. They are finished; that story has been told.

But I flip through and I come to the end of the album. And there are all these blank pages. And I wonder how I am going to fill them up with new pictures? And with those new pictures, what new story will they tell? Will the story that I create in those new pages tell a story of a life that made a difference? Will the story written in those new pages, be of a life that made a difference? I guess that is up to me. I guess that is up to you too.

On Rosh Hashanah, God opens the book of our deeds and if we merit, He inscribes our names there. And if we repent, and we pray and give some tzedakah, on this day, Yom Kippur, God will seal our names in that book. Then tomorrow night, the gates of forgiveness will close. But just before they do, just a moment before those gates close, God will open a new page for us in His book. He’s going to open a new page for us in that Book of Life.

Rabbi Bruce Dollin

A shrai gevalt. My friends, I have become just like my grandparents, always worrying about the children.
I am worried about the kids. Yes, my own, of course, but about Jewish children in general.

A classmate of mine, Rabbi Danny Gordis who now works at the Shalem Center, a think tank in Jerusalem, brings to light the following.

An American rabbinical student spending his study year in Israel decides to celebrate his birthday at a bar in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority. He says Ramallah is very dear to him. He invites his friends and takes pictures. On the walls behind him are hateful anti-Israel posters encouraging violence and jihad. The bar is located not far from the recently dedicated Dalal Mughrabi Square, named for a terrorist who participated in one of the worst attacks on Israeli civilians in Israel’s history. Dalal Mughrabi killed 37 innocent people including 13 children.
Gordis wasn’t amused. He has children in the IDF walking those same dangerous streets in Ramallah, targets of those very same terrorists.
Gordis also intercepted an email by a rabbinical student who wanted to buy a new tallis so he was “seeking advice about what to buy and where to get it. The student noted that there was only one stipulation, the tallit could not be made in Israel.” Boycotting Israeli goods.

He brings up as well, that “not long ago, other rabbinical students were discussing how to add relevance to their observance of Tisha B’Av. They began to compile a list of other moments in history that should be mourned. One suggested that 1948 be added…. It was time, this student said, to mourn the creation of the State of Israel.”

This rabbinical student was echoing an idea that is out there in the Jewish Community. A New Israel Fund director, Hedva Radonavitz was exposed by Wikileaks to have said, “in a hundred years, Israel would be majority Arab and the disappearance of the Jewish State would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.” Important to note, this is not the position of the The New Israel Fund and Ms. Radovanitz was given her walking papers. But these ideas are out there in the Jewish Community. One goes like this: “Israel mistreats Palestinians and the whole world dislikes Israel. Israel has become an embarrassment for progressive Jews. Perhaps the creation of the State of Israel was a mistake.” This idea is out there in our community and this student was trying the idea on for size.

Gordis writes: “what is entirely gone [in these students] is an instinct of belonging—the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are part of a People, that the blood and the losses that were required to create the state of Israel is their blood and their loss……. The right of these rabbinical students to criticize Israel is not in question. What is lacking in their view and their approach is the sense that no matter how devoted Jews may be to humanity at large, we owe our devotion first and foremost to one particular People—our own People.”
It’s about Peoplehood. Gordis says there must be a fundamental loyalty by Jews to Jews. These young people may be angry at Israel, but loyalty? They owe us at least that!

They owe us at least that? You know, with due respect to my colleague, Danny Gordis, I am not so sure. It’s complicated. Young Jews are asking the question that my generation would not have asked but it doesn’t mean their question isn’t legitimate. Why must they be loyal to just one People, the Jewish People? In fact, they ask, why be loyal to anything at all?

Loyalty is a funny thing. We all think it is important virtue but we don’t really see it very often.

Some say, we never saw it very often. Disloyalty; which is to say, betrayal is what makes the news, even in ancient times it made the news. Shakespeare. The Caesar says as he dies “Et tu brute?” A foundational story for the Roman Empire, Brutus murders his friend and confidant, the most powerful man in the world, Julius Caesar. This famous betrayal changes history. The Christians have one of these. For a few coins, Apostle Judas betrays his friend, Jesus, leading to his execution by the Romans. Just our luck, Judas, Judah, Jew. This one hasn’t been a great story for us, but again, betrayal determines history. And by the way, Christians, at least in theory, hated betrayers. Dante’s Inferno: the lowest level of hell was for those who betrayed their friends. Even Satan hated these guys. Loyalty was the ideal, but it was the disloyalist that moved history along.

And don’t think we Jews don’t have our stories of disloyalty. We read one of those stories today. Abraham kicks his wife and kid, Hagar and Ishmael out of the house just because Sara doesn’t like them. No loyalty there. Tomorrow, Abraham is willing to sacrifice his own son; no loyalty there. Jacob betrays his twin brother Esav. Uncle Lavan betrays Jacob. Joseph’s brothers betray him. The new Pharoah betrays the Israelites. The Jewish People betray God. Jews betray Jews. In the Talmud, we read a story of a Jewish guest insulted at a party who runs to the Roman overlords and informs on all the Jews, which leads directly to the destruction of the Temple. There again, it is disloyalty, not loyalty, that changes history.

There wasn’t much loyalty then and there certainly isn’t much loyalty today. Don’t even open the newspaper in the morning. The ever growing list of public figures who have betrayed their wives: Weiner, Schwarzenegger, Spitzer, Strauss-Kahan. That’s only the recent list of infidelity and disloyalty. There are other lists and longer ones. It has not escaped my attention, by the way, that three of the four on this particular list are Jews.

I guess we don’t expect much of people in Hollywood, but even there, this one got to me. I just came upon this incident researching for this sermon. I brought it up at the kitchen table and my kids laughed at me. Abba, that’s so last year, where have you been?” But ok. Look, I like Sandra Bullock. There she was accepting the Oscar for Best Actress. She looks with tears in her eyes to her husband sitting in the audience and says, “there is no surprise that my work got better when I met you, because I never knew what it was like for someone to have my back.” Camera pans to her husband Jesse… James. That should have already given it away. But Jesse too has tears in his eyes. And then…one week later we get the news: old Jesse was having an affair with a tattoo model named Bombshell McGee. Seriously Jessie? Even in Hollywood. Bombshell McGee vs Sandra Bullock? Ok. It’s not so much about Jesse’s bad choices here. It is that Sandra Bullock was speaking to a couple hundred million people worldwide about “loyalty!” If you can have loyalty in Hollywood, you can have it anywhere she had someone she thought had her back. He didn’t.

We see disloyalty all around us, always have. It has made us into skeptics. We are loyal at our own risk. We think people have our backs and then they stab us there. Young people today ask why be loyal to anything? And it’s a very good question.
So it’s not surprising that young Jewish adults ask the question, why be loyal to the Jewish People? Why should that be important to them? What’s in it for them? What’s the point?

So believe me. I shrai gevalt. My friends, if young Jews are asking the question, what is the point of being a part of our People, we had better come up with some good answers and soon. They need to hear a good argument from us. They need to be convinced. Their loyalty is not reflexive; it is not instinctual. Their loyalty, for better or worse, must be earned.

We have to make a good argument. Well, let me start with a few arguments I won’t make because they don’t work anymore.
I am not going to tell our young people today, to be proud of the Jewish People because we are a Chosen People; that we are somehow special; that we are the People of the Book. And we always taught our kids to read and be good students and that is why we have gotten ahead. I am not going to say that we are superior somehow. Because we aren’t. Other people read books and educate their children and do just fine. There are over 2 billion Christians in the world; over a billion Muslims. They seem to be doing ok. There are only 15 million Jews in world. If we are the Chosen People, we are certainly not the only ones.

So I am not going to make the argument that we are the Chosen People.

I am also not going to make the argument that these young Jewish People are a part of a chain of tradition and they mustn’t break that chain. When I hear this argument, I think of the father in the car on the way to Hebrew School with his son screaming in protest in the back seat. And the father yells., “I suffered going to Hebrew School and by God, you are going to go the Hebrew school and suffer as well.” “You can’t let your grandparents down who came to this country as poor Jews.” “ Don’t break the chain of a proud people,” we say. But they reply: “why not break the chain? All kinds of chains have been broken in history. Peoples have come and gone throughout all the ages. Why should this People continue and why should I even care?

So I won’t be making the argument that they are a link in the chain and they mustn’t break the chain.

And I am not going to make the argument that Jews died for being Jews and you young people owe it to them to be Jewish so that our dead will not have died in vain. Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a Holocaust survivor, made this argument. He said that after the Holocaust, God gave the Jewish People one more commandment, the 614th commandment if you will. And that commandment? Survive. Hitler tried to annihilate us and we will defeat him by surviving. This was an enormously powerful idea in my generation as we knew survivors, our parents and grandparents were survivors. But there are young people in this congregation as I speak to you today that have never met a survivor. The Holocaust was 60 years ago. Young Jews don’t see Jews as survivors. Young Jews don’t see Jews as threatened. Anti-Semitism is rare in our society. Young Jews take for granted the existence and the strength of the State of Israel. Young Jews simply do not see it as their obligation to protect Jews and defeat Hitler.

These old arguments that just don’t work anymore.

So I am going to have to make a better one and in this case, I guess, I am going to have to make this argument in Ramallah. I will sit with my future colleague celebrating his birthday there with Palestinians. I will engage him in conversation about loyalty to Israel and to the Jewish People. If I were there with him, today, this is what I would say.

First. My young friend. I am glad you are in Ramallah. I know that you know that in this place, there are people who hate Israel, hate Jews and wish them, you and me, ill. I know you know that your being here in Ramallah, is deeply disturbing to many of us in the Jewish community. But you know what? I am glad you are here. Because being a Jew sometimes means making a disturbance. It means being radical and challenging everything especially if it involves power. It’s called in Hebrew: tzedek. The verse, “tzedek tirdof,” justice, will you pursue. It uses the term, tirdof: pursue. God expects us not only to be just but to pursue it, to create justice wherever it doesn’t exist. Moses stands toe to toe with Pharaoh and says three words that change history forever, in Hebrew: “shelach et ami“ Let My people go. “M’avdut, l’cherut,” from slavery to freedom. Freedom from tyranny is the Divine right of every human being on this earth.

And that is why, by the way, tyrants throughout history have targeted the Jews, from Pharaoh to Haman, to Torquemada, to Adolph Hitler. Because tyrants know that if there is a single Jew left in this world that Jew will cry foul. That Jew will rile people up. That Jew will cause trouble. Speaking truth to power is deeply Jewish.

And Jews speak truth to Jewish power, as well. We challenge our own leaders. The Prophets of Israel challenge the Kings of Israel. King David has his soldier Uriah killed so he could take Uriah’s wife Bat Sheva. The Prophet Nathan goes to the King, to the most powerful man ever in Israelite history: “Ata ha ish:” says Nathan. You, King David, are a sinner, a murderer, an adulterer. Here is the Prophet Jeremiah to Kings, “On your clothing is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor. You shall be put to shame.,” Here is Isaiah, shame upon the Kings: “your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves. [They] love bribes and follows after rewards; they judge not the orphans neither does the cause of the widow reach them.”

The Prophets of Israel demanded justice even from the Kings of Israel. Then how much more so do they demand justice of us.
My young friend, I know you are in Ramallah to make a statement. You are angry at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. I get that. Just know that it is your Judaism and the Jewish community that have brought you here. It is we who are teaching you to challenge us. It is what we hope for in you. Challenge us to make us better. Challenge us to make the world better.

Second. I’m glad you are in Ramallah because when you go home tonight, you are going to have to justify being here. You might have some of your fellow students congratulate you for being brave and standing by your convictions and going to Ramallah to make a statement. But mostly, you are going to have to justify to your peers, to your teachers, to your rabbis, to your parents, why you spent your birthday here in a place where enemies of Jews reside. And ultimately, you will have to justify it to yourself. That’s very Jewish as well. We call it “cheshbon nefesh,” an examination of one’s own soul.

Your Judaism is important to you, because it demands something from you. On Rosh Hashanah, we ask God for forgiveness of our sins. We stand toe to toe, so to speak, with ourselves and demand justice. Judaism compels us to explore the dark places in our own souls that prevent us from being who we know we should be. Musar Master, Rabbi Mendal of Satanov wrote the classic text on “cheshbon nefesh.” He speaks of three important virtues that might apply to us right here in Ramallah. The first is called “charitzut,” best translated as deliberateness. All that you do should be preceded by careful deliberation. Think before you act. Sometimes taking principled stands, like birthdays in Ramallah, are more ego than principle. Make sure that you are in Ramallah for the right reasons and the stands that you take are actually helpful to somebody. The second virtue: “emet,” truth. Be very careful when you speak in the name of truth. Clever words said with conviction don’t make something true. If you are certain you are right, most likely, you are wrong. It takes time to get to the truth. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime. So when you speak in the name of truth do so with the third virtue mentioned by the Rabbi of Satanov. He called it “anavah,” which means humility. We are not God. We are frail, vulnerable creatures trying to find our way, doing the best we can. We make mistakes. Israel makes mistakes. You and I make mistakes. Humility means to be more critical of yourself and less critical of others.
The Psalmist says: “Search out [your own] iniquities; …do a diligent search…”

“Cheshbon nesfesh.” Just as you challenge others, so must you challenge your own ideas, your own beliefs, what you think is correct and just and true.

And finally. I am glad you are in Ramallah because I know that soon, you will leave this place and go home. You are ignoring for the time being, the hateful posters on the walls. You are not thinking about Magroubi Square, just down the block. You are making a statement about occupation and the aspirations of Palestinians and I understand that. Good for you. But you and I both know something that is much more important to you than these politics. For tonight, you are going back to Jerusalem. You are going to continue your studies in rabbinical school, there. You are going to speak Hebrew. You are going to study the very same sacred texts that have been studied for thousands of years by your ancestors. . And you are going to eat with your friends, and make the minyan and watch Israelis go to work, and their kids go to school. And you will get on the buses and cross the streets and live in a Jewish country. And, I suspect, you will find this deeply satisfying.

And why is that? It is because you will be among people that know you, that share your history and culture, and your faith and your values. And that is very powerful and compelling. You may have a few friends in Ramallah who are nice to you. But you know that your home is not there. It is being in your own community that moves you somewhere deep in your soul.

We are social animals. Our brains are made to connect with others. Neuroscientists watch this happen on their computer screens. When we are around people who we know and know us, and with people who we care about and care about us: our brains release the pleasure chemical oxytocin. Our brains condition us to connect deeply with others. It is a primal human need.

Everyone needs a community in which they are noticed, and acknowledged, and appreciated, and valued and loved. No matter how hard you try to be in Ramallah, with the people there; your community is back in Jerusalem or back at Seminary in America, or back in your shul, in the Jewish community wherever you end up. Because it will be in that community where you will celebrate your marriage, and the birth of your child, and mourn the death of your parent. It will be in that community where you will rejoice in everything good that happens to you in your life and where you will get support when life breaks your heart.

The community needs us, it’s true. But you and I need the community even more so. Without it, we are like wanderers. We are just too alone. Humphry Bogart’s last line in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. It is a classic line and it’s true. He says: “A man alone ain’t got no chance.” A Jew alone aint got no chance. A Jew needs a home.

My young friend. I am a loyal Jew because it demands of me to fix this very broken world. And that’s important. I am a loyal Jew because it demands of me to fix my very broken self. And that is important. And I am a loyal Jew because it is among My People alone that I am fully accepted and cherished. I am loved. And that is the most important thing of all. That’s why I am a Jew… loyal to my People, first and foremost.

And you, my young friend here in Ramallah, you, have a place among us as well. So, come with me now. Let’s go back to Jerusalem and let me be the first to welcome you home.

Rabbi Bruce Dollin

There was as year that I thought about Sukkot early enough to actually make some changes in my Sukkah. For years, I struggled with a self made Sukkah that would take me hours to put up and it never stood up exactly straight. My little kids would run about grabbing and taking my tools and small but crucial parts of the structure which cost me even more time. I dreamed of that day when my kids would be old enough to build the Sukkah themselves while I sat on the porch with my ice tea, “supervising.”

And then one day I decided on a “pre-fab.” That was the best ritual decision I ever made in my life. No more Home Depot at the last minute. No more pipes and wires and bricks and cut branches with their pine needles falling in my soup. Now it would take just one hour and the thing was up and the “schach” was bamboo to be used year after year and it was even “kosher.” Why had I resisted this for so many years? When Yoni was 14, he became the family building “general,” and rallied the troops (his three siblings) to put up the Sukkah and finally, I could sit around and be lazy and fully appreciate the fact that I made it through the High Holidays one more year.

So everyone, I say to you the two sweetest words in Jewish ritual life: “pre-fab.” You won’t be disappointed.

But whether your Sukkah is pre-fab (I can give you the names of some companies that send it to your door, or just “google” it) or made from scratch (Neal Price is an expert on these and available for consultation), the important part of doing this “mitzvah” is simply getting out there and doing it and then using it. Sukkot is the happiest holiday of the year because it gives us time to sit outdoors with our family and friends, share meals and commune with God’s natural world. We put up symbols of the harvest on the walls of the Sukkah to remind us of the miracle of a world that provides us with sustenance and joy.

Take some time to think about how you and your family will observe Sukkot this year. Build a Sukkah (or better yet, have your kids build it!) Plan the meals and invite your friends over. It’s fun; it’s meaningful and neither you nor your children will ever forget the time they spent with you in the backyard putting up the family Sukkah.

Enjoy!

Tammy, Yoni, Shai, Akiva, Aviva and I wish you a wonderful, happy and healthy new year.

One of the most famous soliloquies of all time was spoken by a young man by the name of Hamlet. Poor Hamlet. His father is murdered by his uncle so that his uncle could marry his mother. Hamlet is enraged. Hamlet is perplexed. What allegiance does he owe to his dead father? His own mother? His own integrity and self-respect?

So, we get in Act 3: “To be or not To be? That is the question……….to die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to….”

Hamlet is speaking like any self respecting existentialist; he is also speaking from a deeply secular perspective. And for a secularist, whether or not to live on is truly a choice that must be made, really, every day of one’s life. To live or to die? Perhaps choosing death rather than suffer the inevitable pain we all have to suffer at one time or another in living our lives.

Our Torah has a very different perspective. For in the Torah: there is no question about living or not living. God gives us life, He gives us a Divine Spark, and we have no right to neglect or to reject this gift. According to our tradition, even doing minimal harm to our bodies, like getting a tattoo, for example, is forbidden. God gives us our bodies, He gives us life and He expects that we will do something with it, something of value, something that is important, indeed, something that could change the whole world.

So we come upon a verse almost immediately in our parasha that gives us this very message loud and clear. It reads, “tzedek, tzedek tirdof.” “Righteousness, righteousness you shall pursue” (Deut 18:20).

The commentators love this verse because they get to imagine why the word tzedek is doubled. Some say the word is doubled because one tzedek refers to the command to be righteous, when it is to your benefit. And the other tzedek is that we should be honest and just even when it isn’t in our interest to do so. Another commentator says that the words are doubled because it teaches us that we should pursue justice (the first tzedek) but only through just means (the second tzedek).

Interesting ideas but this is not the part of the verse that fascinates me. It’s the other key word in the verse: tirdof which means, “you shall pursue.” Tirdof is in the second person command form of the verb “radaf” which has three meanings in the Bible. The first means to pursue, but not as in our verse. If you are running after someone to kill them, you are a “rodef” and according to Jewish law, the one you are pursuing can protect him by killing you first. The second meaning is that of persecution which is how Job uses the term to describe his so-called friend, Bildad: “Lama tirdefuni: why do you harass me or persecute me [with your ideas]?

Notice that both of these connotations of the verb radaf are negative and hostile: harassment, persecution, chasing someone to kill them. But then we have our verse: tzedek, tzedek tirdof: righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue.

Suddenly the Torah brings the verb into a verse that is very positive. Here we don’t pursue to kill or harm, or harass. What we are pursuing is righteousness.

Perhaps what the Torah is telling us is that we really have two choices. We can pursue justice and create a civilized society in which people respect each other and each other’s property, or we can do nothing, remain passive and let society go where it will which is probably away from God and towards evil. If we do not pursue justice (tirdof), we will be pursued by evil (rodef); or will be harassed by evil (tirdifuni). Our choice is clear: justice or evil –there are no other choices available.

Now I come to what I like most about the verse. The form of the verb tirdof is a command form “to pursue.” It is an action verb; it requires of us to do something. The Torah could have said be just. Be righteous –and leave it at that. But the Torah has no interest is what you are now, but rather concerned with what you are becoming. A person can’t “be” righteous. What would that mean? A person who doesn’t cheat and steal? A good guy who minds his own business. Better than nothing, perhaps, but there is nothing special about a person like that. “Being righteous” yet remaining passive means that one might ignore someone who needs help, who may be hungry, or ill, or lonely. To “be” righteous means to do no wrong; it doesn’t go farther than that and from God’s perspective, that isn’t really being righteous at all.

So the Torah says “pursue” righteousness. Of course, be righteous yourself, free of sin. Yes, examine your ways, be fair, be kind, observe the law. But don’t stop there. Rather, get out in the world and create justice where there is none. Jews must get involved in what happens in this world, day to day. Pursuing righteousness is never passing up the opportunity to make things right when they are wrong. Jews must make a difference in the world, to be, as our Prophet says, a light unto the nations.

So when we go back to Hamlet, we see that this brilliant and complex young man is missing the point of his life all together. He hesitates, he ponders, he considers and he doesn’t do anything which allows the live of his family members and his friends to spin out of control into unnecessary disaster. At the end of the play, as you may remember, most of the characters lie dead on the stage.

The question isn’t, “to be or not to be.” The question is how to help, what to do and when to do it so that it we contribute significantly to improving our world.

That’s what it means to be a Jew. Nothing easy about it, but it provides for a life that is infused with meaning and importance. And what more can you ask for than that?

You may not have known this, but neuroscientists are pretty clear about it: up to one third of your brain mass is dedicated to the faculty of sight. Obviously, a very important faculty in human beings. Yet sight is a funny thing. If you go down to the 16th Street Pedestrian Mall and try to cross the street, you better look both ways, because those free buses they provide will run you right down and squash you like a bug if you step in front of them. You have to look both ways. But if you think about it: what we see hurling down upon us to kill us, in the 16th Street Mall, isn’t really the bus in itself but a representation of the bus that is created in our brains as a result of light hitting the retina which sends electric signals to the occipital lobe and so on. It’s a good representation: we can tell that the bus is a big, dangerous moving thing that will hit us and hurt us so we need to stay out from in front of it. But the brain is putting all of this together: it’s interpreting what is out there from light waves, retinas and electrical impulses stimulating gray matter.

But there is even more to this. Our brains are seeing the bus coming at us but our brains must work even harder to interpret what our brains are seeing. Is this bus a threat in and of itself? Maybe there are hoodlums on the bus that will hurt us when they get off the bus? Maybe the bus is speeding and we get angry because of that. Maybe we don’t like buses at all because they cost us taxpayer’s money and we are libertarians. A whole world of interpretation comes with what our brains are seeing; and often, these interpretations are dead wrong which make us do stupid things.

Here’s one from the Torah. Exodus Chapter One; Verse 8: “A new King arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Behold. The people, the Children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we. Come, let us outsmart it lest it become numerous and it be that if a war will occur, it, too, may join our enemies and wage war against us…” Pharaoh saw the people of Israel with his eyes, but how he interpreted what he saw was completely wrong. Certainly the Israelites didn’t outnumber the Egyptians. They were most certainly not stronger physically than the Egyptians. Pharaoh had no reason to believe that the Israelites would rebel against him in a time of war. They had lived peacefully within Egypt for 100 years in an era where there were wars and the Israelites most certainly did not rebel. Their ancestor Joseph had saved the country from famine: this Pharaoh didn’t know Joseph personally but must have heard about him —and duly ignored the fact. Here is the first example we have of overt anti-Semitism. A perverse misinterpretation of the facts. Pharaoh looked, he saw and he got it entirely wrong. The result? Ten plagues including the death of his own first born, among others. And you know what happened at the Sea of Reeds. Dead Egyptian soldiers washing up on its shores. Misinterpretation of what we see, especially if we have power, often leads to catastrophe.

Sometimes, evil men can intentionally misinterpret the facts to mislead others. From the Bible. Haman says to the King, “there are a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from every other people’s. They do not observe even the Kings’ laws; therefore it is not befitting the King to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8). The King looks and sees the people living in his kingdom but sees an enemy where there is no enemy. In the Book of Esther, disaster comes close.

And here is another example. This week’s parasha. Balak, the King of Moab heard about Israel’s military victories against the Amorites who attacked Israel. He must not have heard about the circumstances. The Israelite were travelling in the desert and Moses sends out emissaries to the Amorite King saying, “Let me pass through your land; we shall not turn off to the field or vineyard; we shall not drink well water; on the king’s road shall we travel, until we pass through your border.” Sichon, the Amorite King didn’t seem to understand this. He saw the Israelite numbers and saw an enemy and attacked and lost and he lost his whole kingdom.

So Balak hears about this and looks out and sees an enemy as well. Listen to the beginning of this episode, “Balak, son of Tzipur saw all that Israel had done to the Amorite. Moab became very frightened because it was numerous….. Moab said to the elders of Midian, “Now the congregation will lick up our entire surroundings, as an ox licks up the greenery of the field.” Then Balak sends a message to Bilam: “Behold, a People has come out of Egypt, behold, it has covered the face of the earth.” (Num 22:2-5). Balak looks, he sees and gets it wrong. Israel will not destroy everything around it. It won’t destroy anything if it isn’t attacked. It will not lick up the ground like an ox. The people do not cover the face of the earth.
So Balak calls upon a sorcerer to curse the people; probably a better move than attacking them outright, but a silly move, none the less.

This theme of sight or lack thereof continues through the whole episode. The donkey can see the angel of God where Bilaam misses it, until God opens his eyes, as we read, “The Lord uncovered Bilaam’s eyes and he saw the angel of the Lord” (Num 22:31).

And here is a seeing, much deeper and more important than the seeing through the eyes. You don’t see angels of God through your eyes. Your eyes see the world, your brain interprets what you see but it is your soul that makes ultimate sense of it all. God uncovered the eyes of Bilaam’s soul. Chapter 24, “Bilaam saw that it was good in God’s eyes to bless Israel” (verse 1). And verse 3, “The words of Bilaam, son of Beor, the words of a man with an open eye; the words of the one who hears the sayings of God, who sees the vision of Shaddai, while fallen and with uncovered eyes.” And then comes the blessings: “How goodly are your tents, oh Jacob, your dwelling places, oh Israel” (Num 3-5).

Pharaoh saw the Israelites and got them wrong. Achashverosh saw the Jews in his kingdom and got them wrong. The Amorites got it wrong. Balak got it wrong and only with Bilaam, did God stop all the nonsense and force the sorcerer to look more carefully at the Israelites and really see them for what they were and for what they meant. Bilaam’s eyes were “uncovered,” and when they were uncovered, Bilaam blessed the People for the great gift that this People would bring to civilization.

It isn’t only the anti-Semite that misinterprets what he sees. The brain is a funny thing. It tends to interpret what we see, even before we see it. We tend to look at the world through a kind of graph paper: seeing only the things that fit into the tiny predesigned boxes of our minds: colored by culture, religion, ideology and often, by just plain pettiness and stupidity. We have to be very careful about our faculty of sight. In the Torah, as part of the Shema prayer in the davening, we read, make “tzi tzit and see them [as they flap around on our clothes and get in the way of things……so that you won’t] go after what your eyes see.” Interesting irony here. Use your eyes to see spiritual truths so that you won’t let your eyes lead you astray. The most central prayer in Judaism; an expression of the deepest spiritual truth, is the Shema itself, which requires of not to use our eyes at all. “Shema,” means, of course, to hear. Hear Israel, the Lord is One. Be careful with your eyes, our most powerful faculty, yet the one most unlikely to lead us to spiritual truths; the one most likely to lead us astray.

We see with our brains and we misread reality with our brains. The Torah tells us to be careful. You should probably trust your eyes when you see a bus bearing down on you. But to see deeper, you must have a healthy skepticism. You should compare notes with others, especially with others who see things differently than you do. If you are really sure you have got it right, you are probably wrong. Think again. Challenge what you see and what you know. And if you wield power over others, all the more so. We live in an age that seems to respect the expression of ideological certainties. Pharaoh was certain; the Amorites were certain; Haman was certain; Hitler was certain. All paved the road for us and for them, straight to disaster.

God ultimately uncovered Bilaam’s eyes. In His great mercy, may He do the same for us.