Drashot for Shabbat Parashat Pinchas - Enjoy!

Finding Meaning in Adversity

A Drash for Shabbat Pinchas

Friday, 13 July 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

There’s a delightful joke that I’ll risk telling – the risk being that it doesn’t ‘translate’ culturally for an Australian congregation.  Here goes.

There was a small Baptist church in the American Heartland – what you would call ‘the Outback’ and what we snobs from one of America’s two coasts like to refer as ‘Flyover Country.’ You know, the parts of the country one flies over when travelling from one to another of the places that ‘matter.’

So this church was one of those old fashioned timber buildings.  It was growing old and was weather-beaten and badly needed new paint.  The pastor, an ageing man serving an ageing congregation, announced before the collection one Sunday that that day’s offering was specifically to buy what was necessary to paint the church.  But when the money was counted, the pastor knew it wasn’t enough to buy sufficient paint to cover the entire building.

After fretting about the situation for some time, the pastor bought as much paint as he could.  He thinned the paint with water to stretch it.  He painted the building.  Working all day, going up and down the ladder continually, he managed to finish the job.  The thinned paint managed to cover the entire building.  He went to sleep, exhausted, and woke up the next morning.

There had been a rainstorm during the night.  When the pastor stepped out of his parsonage to walk the few steps to the church, he was aghast to see that the thinned paint had run in the storm and was largely washed off the building.

The pastor fell on his knees and prayed.  He asked G-d repeatedly what he should do.  Suddenly, a voice came out of the heavens.  It said:

Repaint, and thin no more!

Repaint, and thin no more!  It was the logical answer, because after all, this is the bottom line in every Christian sermon, preached from every Christian pulpit on every Sunday – and on Wednesday evening, for those Christians who can’t get enough on Sunday.  Repaint, and thin no more!  That is to say:  Repent, and sin no more!

Okay, I hope you understand that I’m being humorous here.  As least I’m trying to be humorous.  I’m not at all contemptuous of my Christian neighbours and the message of their religion.  Even if it were true that the bottom line of every Christian sermon was repent and sin no more, what would be so terrible about that?  An unhappy truth is that we – humanity – spread a lot of suffering around in the world because we ‘sin’ – we behave badly toward one another.  Repent and sin no more is, in nutshell, the theme of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year…get your tickets now!

So if every Christian sermon has the same bottom line – and I can’t really say that it does – that’s not a bad thing at all.  But in Judaism, things are a little more complex.  We have all kinds of sermons, with all kinds of bottom lines, and I’m guessing that you’ve heard just about every kind delivered from this pulpit.  There are midrashic sermons.  Mystical sermons.  Political sermons.  Movie and book review sermons.

If you’ve been following my pulpit speaking, you’re by now aware that I tend to stick to sermons of the most basic kinds.  I’m not against giving a political sermon, but Levy’s First Commandment is:  Thou shalt preach a political sermon no more frequently than once a year.  It usually takes me that long to recover the good will of the people I offend when I give a political sermon.  Besides, there doesn’t seem to be too much in Australian politics that is sermon-worthy.  I mean. Let’s face it:  your politics here are rather plain vanilla!  Maybe that’s because I’m too new here to catch a lot of the subtleties.  Perhaps in a couple of years’ time I’ll feel confident enough to try to sermonize on them.  But then we’re back to Levy’s First Commandment!

The type of sermons, from which I really shy away are the last category – movie and book reviews.  Want movie reviews?  Get on the wold wide web and search for ‘Rotten Tomatoes.’  Or try the site ‘IMDB – Internet Movie Data Base.’ In either place, you can read movie reviews to your heart’s content.  Want book reviews?  Amazon.com is chock full of them.  The New York Times will give you more professionally-crafted ones.  I could probably write a movie or book review well enough to be useful if I had a good reason to do so.  However, I’m guessing it would not make a compelling reason for you to attend services here on a Friday evening.

So I don’t give reviews…but I do sometimes give recommendations.  And tonight, I’d like to offer a quick recommendation for an unknown book by an unknown author.  I’ve just finished reading the book, and it resonated very deeply with me.  The book is I Was Young and I Wanted to Live by David Huban.  It’s not an easy book to find; nobody in the Land of Oz seems to have a copy for sale.  I happened into it because the author is the cousin of Marika Maselli, one of our members here.  Marika loaned me a copy of the book to read.  It is a journal of one young man’s experience in the Shoah, the Nazi Holocaust that engulfed Europe between the 1930’s and 1945, when World War II ended.

Marika’s cousin, David – his original Hungarian name was Denes – embodied the ordinariness that I talked about at my induction sermon a couple of weeks ago.  He was not a brilliant scholar.  He was not a world-class athlete.  He had no outward talent or quality that would make one predict that he was the one in thousands who would survive while others perished.  No, he was just an ordinary man, with an extra-ordinary will to live.  He was young, and he wanted to live.  He looked at the lot he’d been dealt in life.  To come of age as a Jew in Europe during a time that has few parallels in the world’s history.  And he wanted to live.  So badly did he want to live, that he had the will to overcome the same adversity that sapped the will to live of so many others.

In the late 1930’s the Nazi restrictions against Jews arrived in young David’s small town in Slovakia.  The town had originally been in Hungary until after World War I.  As a teenager, he faced a big world that didn’t want a part of him.  A world that preferred him dead.  A world that looked upon him, a young man who happened to be Jewish by birth, with scorn and loathing.  But David Huban was not about to accept the death sentence that the world had pronounced upon him.

Has anybody here ever attended a dying parent or other relative?  If you have, maybe you watched them fight death.  Perhaps they fought for a long time.  And then, suddenly they stopped fighting.  If you were there at that moment in a person’s life, you knew it.  You could see it in their eyes, in their face.  When that person lost the will, the fight to live, they died.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Death is, after all simply part of life.  Guess what?  We’re all going to die.  Surprise!  May it come for each of us, only at the end of a long, happy and productive life, and with little pain or suffering.  Amen. 

David Huban looked at the world around him, at people his age and younger dying for no reason save the hate toward them that was being spewed about.  And he made a choice.  I’m going to live.  He fought to live.  Through the months in concentration camps.  Through harrowing encounters.  He didn’t live because he was extraordinarily heroic.  Or clever.  He was actually both:  heroic and clever.  But that’s not why he lived.

He lived because he chose to live.  He chose to live.  He had to live if he was to fulfil his promise to his parents.  As he ran for his life to the Hungarian border when the Slovakian Nazi collaborators.  He promised his parents that he would survive.  He promised that he would return.  Unfortunately, his parents did not.  But that’s another story…

The message from I Was Young and Wanted to Live, then, is a simple message.  One that resonates with a simple man like me.  It is this.  We can complain all we like about our lot.  Or we can decide to overcome, and thrive.  To live.  As this one extra-ordinarily ordinary Jewish teenager did, when his world collapsed around him.

So now it’s Shabbat.  Shabbat sets in here, in our part of the world, earlier than in most of the rest of the world.  As it does, let us celebrate life.  Let us lay aside whatever may have been troubling us over the last six days.  Let us decide to live.  To overcome adversities small and large.  To live, and to make our lives count.  Shabbat shalom!

Finding Meaning in a ‘Lost’ Ritual

A Drash for Parashat Pinchas

Saturday, 14 July 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

I sometimes joke that during the period of about three weeks starting with the first of Tishri, we Jews easily succumb to ‘Religion Fatigue.’  Starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, with Yom Kippur and Sukkot in between.  We have what amount to four major festival days of obligation.  Each has its own theme, its own feel, and its own rituals.  Its own joys.  To miss any one of them, to let it pass by without celebrating or observing it, is to miss an opportunity for a wonderful and meaningful occasion.  So why would one ignore one of these major festivals?  Religion Fatigue.  We get tired of coming to the synagogue, tired of seeing the same people yet again, tired of ‘being good.’  Tired of the rabbi’s sermons.  Tired of re-organizing our daily and weekly routines to fit the once-per-year marathon of festivals.

It’s ‘worse’ in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, you know!  They still double the days of the festivals.  This is a holdover from the ancient times when word of the sighting of the New Moon in Jerusalem could not quickly reach diaspora communities.  At the same time, astronomical calculations were not so precise as today.  A New Moon could be predicted only within a span of two days.  So outside of the Land of Israel, when the New Moon in Jerusalem determined the exact times to observe the festivals, they were done for two days to make sure the community observed it on the correct day, which would be one of the two.  Why, after all would the community want to risk inadvertently transgressing G-d’s law by observing the festival on the wrong day?  The second day was a safeguard against that possibility.

Fast forward to the Nineteenth Century.  Removal of the second day of festivals was one of the first reforms enacted within the movement which came to be known as Reform Judaism, the spiritual forebear of our Progressive Judaism.  The reformers realized they didn’t need the second day to make sure the congregation would get the ‘right’ day.  By that time, the science of astronomical calculation had advanced to where the New Moon could be predicted years in advance, and very precisely.  At the same time, it was noted that the second days of festivals were often burdensome to members of the community who had a pay check to earn, a business to run, a profession to practice.  Going back to the period in Tishri, it meant four days of lost work – and four days when one must knock off somewhat early to prepare.  This, rather than eight days plus lost in most years.  Since we’re not reclusive and must function in the greater world, it made perfect sense.

The more traditionalist versions of Judaism retained the second day.  The rationale was that, even if it is no longer a necessary step to make sure we observe the correct day, it is after all a tradition!  Additionally, as my Orthodox colleagues like to say, we’re not living in the Land of Israel.  We therefore need the extra spiritual lift that the extra day provides.  Want to see how many Jews think they need an additional day’s ‘spiritual lift’?  Attend an Orthodox congregation on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.  They’ll be glad you did; you’ll help them to make a minyan, since most of their members are not present after the first day.

But before you accuse me of criticising Orthodox Judaism, understand that that is not my intent here.  I’m only making a statement about us Jews and our lack of sitzfleisch.  We can only sit in shul so many hours.  We get Religion Fatigue.  This fact transcends ‘denominational’ lines! 

In this morning’s reading from Parashat Pinchas, I read of the sacrifices to be offered in the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary, for weekdays, Sabbaths and New Moons.  When King Solomon built the Beit Mikdash, the permanent Temple on Mount Zion, the rituals until-then associated with the Mishkan were transferred to that venue.  When the Beit Mikdash was destroyed, these sacrifices went away…at least until sometime in the future when the Temple may be rebuilt.  Most of us in this room this morning are not waiting ‘with bated breath’ for that to happen.  Even the great Rambam, Moses Maimonides who lived in the 12^th century and died in 1204 of the Common Era did not.  He suggested that the cultus of priests and sacrifices was a transitionary phase.  He thought it was intended to take us from ancient pagan worship to the ‘pure’ ‘sacrifice of the heart’ – prayer and worship as we know it.  But that’s another sermon, for another day…

Since we no longer offer the kinds of sacrifices detailed in today’s reading, how are we to benefit from this reading?  Obviously, in a historical context.  Our reading of it connects us to what our distant ancestors did, even if we’re no longer doing it.

Our ancestors celebrated joyously when the New Moon appeared.  Most of us today, if we’re not fishermen or farmers, barely notice the cycles of the moon.  They have very little to do with our day-to-day reality in our mechanized, hermetically-sealed worlds.  Not so our ancient forebears.  In the pagan times that predated the development of the worship of the One G-d – the religion that came to be known as Judaism – the people were thankful for the appearance of the New Moon.  It meant that the light that brought a certain comfort in the night was not going to be snuffed out.  The appearance of the New Moon gave them renewed hope that life would continue.

Although the era of Torah took away that fear that the waning moon heralded the end of the world, we know that old habits die hard.  So the Torah commanded offerings of thanksgiving upon the appearance of the New Moon.  As the message of Torah began to really sink in, the reason for celebrating the New Moon shifted.  All the festivals are calculated by the appearance of the New Moon.  Therefore, each New Moon’s appearance heralds the coming of the festive days that will occur in that month.

There are no festive days in the month that will begin with the appearance of the New Moon on this coming Friday.  The New Moon that we just announced before we put the Torah away.  This will be the New Moon of Av.  Av is the month on whose ninth day we observe a fast for a string of tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people on the same date in various years of history.  The Ninth of Av – Tish B’Av – occurs on the 29^th of July this year.  But more about that next week.

So Rosh Chodesh – the New Moon festival – helps to being us a sense of Chadash – newness – as we mark the passage of time.  The Jewish calendar is like life itself – joyous occasions alternating with sad occasions.  Together they form the rhythm that is the cycle of the year – the cycle of our lives.

Celebration of Rosh Chodesh has fallen into obscurity in much of the Jewish world today.  But there are progressive congregations that have reclaimed it.  In many places it has been re-invented as specifically a women’s holiday.  Why so?  For reasons that I need not get into, cycles of the month are seem as symbolic of women’s reality.  When Aaron and the people Israel were sinning by putting their precious metals together to craft the Golden Calf, the women of Israel steadfastly refused to willingly give up their gold ornaments.  At least, there is a Midrash that informs us of this.  Now, if you ask me, I don’t think the women were so afraid of sin…I think they were just unwilling to give up their jewellery!  But be that as it may.  From this narrative tradition, and the symbolic connection of monthly cycles with the female body, comes a custom.  The custom is to declare Rosh Chodesh a ‘women’s holiday,’ a day when women are not obligated to do any work and when they can relax and celebrate.  Many congregations have created women’s Rosh Chodesh groups for worship, study and fellowship.  Is this something that could take hold here?

So we read of the Rosh Chodesh offerings today.  On this Shabbat when we announce the coming of Rosh Chodesh Av this coming Friday.  The message, to me, is this.  Celebrating Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon needn’t be a ‘lost’ ritual.  Even if our concerns are not the same as those of our ancient forebears, we can find a rationale to stop our busy routines and mark its passage.  We might use it as a reminder of the lives of our distant ancestors.  Or we might use it to create new and meaningful ways to celebrate our lives today.  Either way, we do well by not succumbing to Religion Fatigue, throwing up our hands, and shouting, Enough!

Rosh Chodesh informs us that all which is stale can be as new.  We can breathe new life into ancient customs.  Next week, with Temple Shalom’s AGM behind us, we can commit ourselves anew to the life of our community.  Instead of perpetually looking back, we can look forward.  Even as the New Moon informed the ancients that life would not end anytime soon, we can take comfort that we are not through yet.  We can move forward from strength to strength.  May G-d grant us the vision to make it so.  May the coming Rosh Chodesh serve as a reminder of the possibilities, with which G-d has blessed us.  Shabbat shalom!