SOME WORDS FOR EREV ROSH HASHANAH 

1 TISHRI 5768 / 12 SEPTEMBER 2007           

Rabbi Kenneth Chasen

“Why Be Jewish?”

"Hey, Chasen," is how it would begin.  There in the halls of Hillcrest Junior High School – I know it was just after the NBC mini-series "The Holocaust" was broadcast.

"Hey, Chasen," he would say.

And I knew what was coming next.  I could tell by the look in his eyes.  By the way he approached.  

"Hey, Chasen, you're Jewish, right?"

"Uh huh," I would nod.

The "you're Jewish" came out gently enough.  With a certain shyness.  Driven by curiosity, not hatred.

"I’ve got a question for you," he would say.

"Here it comes…" I would think to myself.

"Shoot," I would respond.

"Well, you're Jewish, right?"

"Yep – still am."

He wouldn't laugh.

"Well, here's what I'm wondering…"

And I’m thinking:  “Let the games begin!”

"How come you guys wear those little beanies?"

"How come you light all those candles at the Jewish Christmas?"

"How come you don't eat bacon?"

“Do you have any idea how good bacon is?”

"Is it true that Jews used to have horns?"

"Why did Hitler want to kill the Jews anyway?"

"My dad says Jew lawyers are the best.  Is that true?"

Around Easter time, one of the more difficult theological questions would be asked:  "How come you guys killed Jesus?"

My Sunday School teacher had not prepared me for that one.  Truth is, I wasn't prepared for most of these questions.

I wondered how they all knew.  When they asked, "you're Jewish, right?"  They already knew.  But how?  I didn't look different from the other kids, did I?  I didn't wear a yarmulke to school.  No gefilte fish in my lunch box or anything.

I looked enough like the other kids.  Acted like them, too.  But somehow they knew.  They always knew.  And I knew too.  I knew I was different.  That we were different.  It wasn't a hardship.  Any anti-Semitism I experienced was rather tame.  The questions I got were not motivated by hatred – just curiosity.  But I was different.  I knew it.

Once upon a time in America , this was the fate of the Jew – to be different.  To be "other."

But today, arguably, that time has passed.  For the first time in our history, total assimilation is possible.  We don't have to be different at all.  We don't have to answer those questions anymore, in this era in which every Jew is, essentially, a Jew by choice.  Which begs a question of its own:  If it's no longer a requirement, an inevitability, why, in the 21st century, at a time when religion and particularism are being questioned as never before, why be Jewish?

Let’s face it… in the 21st century, “Why be Jewish?” doesn’t elicit the easy answers that might have come from our ancestors, for there exists a rather interesting paradox inside a great many of us in this room.  On the one hand, we’re all here – our overwhelming, mass loyalty to these holidays suggests that our being Jewish is, in some way, fundamentally very important to us.  On the other hand, many in this room would state – if not aloud, then in the quiet honesty of our hearts – that our Judaism is not, in fact, all that important to us.  The paradox… We’re deeply proud to be Jews, and yet admit to knowing little about what being Jewish really means.  We want to guarantee a Jewish tomorrow – and we most surely want our kids and grandkids to be a part of that Jewish tomorrow – and yet if they asked us to tell them why, how many of us would essentially be stumped?

What do we say when asked by our children and grandchildren why being Jewish should matter to them?  Most typically, the answer has to do with values of ethical humanism.  “Judaism is about being good,” we might say.  “It teaches us that we are one with all of humanity, and it equips us to be decent human beings.”

The problem, of course, with this explanation is that one need not be Jewish to be good… which means that being good is not, in and of itself, a means for defining and perpetuating Judaism.  That is to say, we would all be delighted if every child in every one of our families grew up to be a good and decent person.  But if, when all was said and done, none of them were Jewish – well, that would gravely disappoint that part of ourselves that brought us all here tonight.

And that begs the question… why should it disappoint us?  I mean, if all of our kids were good, ethical people, wouldn’t that be enough?  What would be the great tragedy if Judaism were to disappear from history, leaving behind only a generation of people dedicated to decency?  

It’s not surprising that we, of all Jews throughout Jewish history, struggle the most with that question.  After all, living, as we do, in the splendor and safety of emancipation, we are naturally attracted to those ideas that we see as binding ourselves to all of humankind.  We have been embraced by our host culture, and we are inclined to embrace it right back by shedding our divisive particularities and recasting our Judaism as a religion of universal humanism.

It’s a tempting proposition – perhaps now more than ever before.  After all, religious particularism has taken a rather ugly black eye in recent years.  9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta… Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir… Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… the Christian fundamentalists who held Terri Schiavo hostage… the wanton murderers of Hizbollah and Hamas… the ultra-Orthodox ideologues determined to settle all of the West Bank… the all-out assault on our country’s separation of church and state by the Christian right – there’s little wonder that we might hesitate before counting on any specific set of religious answers to the questions that face human beings, humankind and our world.

The question is whether we should be any more trusting of a rationalist, universal ethics that could purportedly connect us all.  Our humanist hearts say yes… but our history books say no.  Eugene Borowitz, long our Reform movement’s greatest theologian, provided us with the sobering reminder when he wrote:  “No caring Jew can easily forget that the very people that proclaimed itself the greatest example of universal humanism did its methodical best to destroy us while the liberal democracies found ways not to do what they might have done to mitigate the murder.”  Indeed, recent history is overloaded with countless human atrocities that cannot be placed at the feet of religion – the gulag, Mao , Cambodia … even the horror of Hiroshima .  If we’re counting on universal ethics to cleanse the world of its ills, we’re going to be in for a long wait.

You see, there is a bit of hubris involved in our asserting that the values dear to us must also be dear to everyone else.  Borowitz rightly described the ideas we call “rational” as the product of “conventional languages of a professional guild of male, white, middle-class, European Christian or Christianized university professors.”  That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  But they’re hardly universal.  As 17^th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it:  “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other.”

More than 300 years later, Pascal’s words are, if anything, even truer than they were when he wrote them.  In the weeks immediately preceding 9/11, a Harvard professor and former Ambassador to Sudan by the name of Werner Daum wrote the following words about depending upon our universal ethics to create a just and humane world:

“I used to be a convinced human-rights universalist,” he wrote.  “I believed that international human-rights tribunals should address the worst violations.  But the wisdom of such tribunals may resonate only with a Western mind,” he cautioned.  “In Cambodia , one of the most horrifying genocides of our century occurred.  While the international community demands a tribunal, the Cambodian government is dragging along, trying to retard and delay it.  But it seems it is not just the government but also the people who oppose the tribunal,” writes Daum.  “Knowledgeable observers point to the Buddhist teaching that even the death of millions of people does not justify vengeance, which would only increase negative karma.  I am not a specialist on Cambodia ,” concludes Daum, “but it seems that Cambodians wish to forget the millions of people who died because death, for them, means something very different from what it does to us.”

So it seems that one person’s justice is another’s vengeance.  We humans can’t even agree on the meaning of death… what would make any of us think that we can agree on the meaning of life?  Clearly, our trust in a universal ethics that would unite a just and moral world must be questioned.

But even here, in our own country, where everyone knows what we mean when we talk of universally held ethics – those who would entrust humanity’s future to those broadly held rational norms do so at their own peril.

Consider this - every day, 16,000 children die of hunger-related causes...that's one child ever five seconds.  Last year, Americans spent 15 billion dollars on pet food. Tht's about four billion dollars more than our government spent on all of its hunger and development related foreign aid programs combined.  It's also more than we Americans as individuals donated to international development and relief projects.

Now, I want to be clear – I have nothing against pets.  I love my dog.  You would love my dog.  And these things aren’t mutually exclusive.  We can feed both our pets and the impoverished children of the world if we wanted to.  But the reality is that the average American – perhaps even many of us – spent more money on pet chow this past year than on saving a starving child's life.

My point is that our faith in universal morality alone to create an ethical world is at best, misplaced and, at worst, criminally negligent.  To be sure, our universalistic values have merit.  They’ve increased tolerance, helped us to celebrate difference.  But universalism, on its own, will not bring about the redemption of the world.  And if that’s the case, then maybe it would be a tragedy – a cataclysmic tragedy for ourselves and our entire world – if Judaism were to disappear.  Maybe there’s a reason why we should get queasy thinking about our children and grandchildren not being Jews.  Maybe we and our world are depending upon Judaism for something.  What might that something be?  

Tonight, I want to propose three answers to the question:  “Why be Jewish?”  Each answer suggests something that is essential for us as individuals, as members of the Jewish community, and for the broader world.  Each answer also explains how Judaism either best or uniquely provides that essential something.  It’s not an exhaustive list, mind you, but I think these answers are fundamental – and the best place to start.

Why be Jewish?  Well, if you care about ethics, perhaps the most compelling reason to be Jewish is this:  Judaism provides an outstanding foundation – the rationale – for living an ethical life.  Fond of the concept of universal human rights?  Judaism first voiced that concept nearly 3000 years ago in the Torah, a document that was so wildly ahead of its time that it remains a worthy and timeless ethical guide, even to this day.  With a literary history like that, what better place could there be for us, as Jews, to learn the notion of universal human rights than by embracing our very own tradition?

With an authority and clarity that universal moral philosophy lacks, Judaism declares and demands the dignity of every human-being.  It’s right there in Genesis, Chapter One.  It’s how we Jews see the world:  “Vayivra Elohim et-ha’adam b’tzalmo” – “And God made humanity in God’s own image.”  However you may conceptualize God, Judaism asserts that each one of us – and not only Jews – is created b’tzelem Elohim.  Each human being is created in that image of God you hold most dear.

In a world where basic human rights, defended on moral grounds, are much too frequently violated, our tradition seeks to change the language of human rights from that of morality to that of sacred obligation.  There is the “stuff” of God in every human being, declares Judaism – even in those we might consider lesser than ourselves, if reason were to be the yardstick of human worth.  And that means every person is entitled to certain rights.  And this truth, fundamental to Judaism from its inception, is something that secular philosophy has failed to deliver.  As Borowitz puts it: “Whereas contemporary philosophy can at best only commend universal human dignity, Hebrew Scriptures command it.”

This principle is embedded not just in that stunning, revolutionary, foundational text in Genesis, but in dozens of other core texts throughout the Bible and Rabbinic tradition.

Leviticus, the very heart of our Torah, commands: v'ahavta l'reiacha kamocha - love your neighbor as yourself.  Today, it seems commonplace - like some sort of American secular invention.  But no one had ever said that until Judaism did.  Maimonides had a 600 year jump on Thomas Jefferson when it came to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  And while a lot of additional influences came along during those 600 years to deliver that worldview to our nation’s founders, it’s probably not a stretch to conclude that without Judaism getting there 600 years earlier, Jefferson probably doesn’t get there at all.

The Talmud underscores this point in its famous teaching about the creation of the first human.  It asks why humanity was created from a single, common ancestor?  Why didn’t God populate the whole earth all at once?  The Talmud answers:  “For the sake of peace and friendship, so that no one could say, ‘my ancestor is better than yours.’”

Now whatever your beliefs are about how this world came into being… or about the authority of the Torah and Talmud in contemporary life… or about God’s role in creation, what’s important to note is that in Judaism’s sacred narrative, in the story we tell that shapes the way we see our world, human rights are more than merely ethical – they’re literally embedded in the design of the world, a design humanity is commanded to respect.  That’s a vantage point that this world will still need long after you and I have left this planet.

Now, that alone should be enough to sustain our commitment to being Jews.  But there’s another equally compelling answer to the question, “Why be Jewish?”  You see, if you’re searching for holiness, for meaning, for hope, for answers to the fundamental question of what on earth it is that we’re supposed to be doing in the time allotted us, Judaism is ready to respond… and its answers belong to us.

Judaism teaches us that meaning can be found in this world, in our own lifetimes; in our interactions with strangers and with family; in our mundane business transactions, and in the sacred business we conduct on days like today.  Perhaps no insight allows for living a life of meaning more profoundly than this belief:  what we do actually matters, and it matters in a cosmic sense.

Judaism emboldens us to believe that God, in a way we cannot fully explain or understand, actually cares about how this peculiar species of ours, living on this pale blue dot in the middle of a rather ordinary little solar system, behaves.  And what insight could possibly offer us more hope, could possibly infuse our existence with greater meaning and holiness?

To be a Jew is to have the audacity to believe that at every moment we can partner with God in creating a better, more just, more righteous world.  And even if it’s not true – that is to say, if this belief that what we do matters is wrong, if at the end of time we were to discover that it was all a cruel joke, that there is no God, and there is no meaning – I would still maintain that Judaism had it right… because no matter the reality, it is simply better to believe that there is meaning in the world and that what we do counts.  It’s better for us as individuals, and globally speaking, any hope for morality in the world would literally fall to pieces without that assumption.

Now, there is a nuance to what Judaism teaches us about meaning that is critical if we are effectively and persuasively to answer the question, “Why be Jewish?”  Judaism teaches that an essential part of living a life of meaning is the fulfillment of specific, Jewish acts.  These are the acts that teach us how to create a world of meaning.

I’ve experienced this in my own life, and I know that you have, too, or else you wouldn’t be here tonight.  When you gather in a house of mourning to help a friend form a minyan, so he can say Kaddish for his father, you’ve felt it.  When you call out the name of a loved one who is in need of healing before offering the Mi Sheberach, you’ve felt it.  When you’ve stood with friends and family in the glow of a havdalah candle, acknowledging the sanctity in time, you’ve felt it.  When you gather with your havurah to share a meal and to catch up with old friends, you’ve felt it.  At your Passover seder, at a babynaming, in Torah study class – you’ve felt it.  For goodness sakes, in the smell of a simmering latke, you’ve felt it.

Why be Jewish?  Because for us as Jews, that’s how we’ve done it.  That’s how we’ve found our way to living a meaningful life – and to doing far more than should ever have been possible to contribute to meaning in this world.  Being Jewish is how we shaped ourselves into the most destruction-defying, world-changing, tiny entity of a people that this planet has ever known. It has all been tied up with our unique, sometimes strange, sometimes perplexing Jewish ways of being.  

That’s the vision that animates everything we do here at Leo Baeck Temple .  And it’s the vision that animates the plans we have for building Leo Baeck Temple … for this extraordinary project that will soon belong to all of us.  Why build this temple?  Because, quite simply, we – like every generation of Jews before us – need, deserve to have a place where we can seek meaning in this lonely world, and then give meaning to this lonely world.  Forty-four years have passed since our congregation last created a timely home for the Jewish acts that we need to change us – to create us.  Like every generation of Jews before, we have the duty to ensure that our home… which houses our congregation’s unique and essential vantage point… will not disappear.  A hundred generations have sustained their synagogues because their collective Jewish life depended upon it, and they sensed that our world somehow depended upon their collective Jewish life.  It’s our turn.  Our President, Laurie Sobelman, will tell you more a little bit later about the exciting plans that are underway and what you can do to help.

You see, we need this temple.  This is where we learn all those little things that declare together, “Life is meaningful.”  I cannot argue for it coherently or explain it fully, but I believe in my bones, in my Jewish kishkes, that my living a meaningful life – and being a source of meaning for others – is somehow wrapped up in my shaking a lulav in the sukkah each year… in my hanging a mezuzah on my doorpost… in my saying the Sh’ma at night with my children... in my placing earth upon the graves at which we stand together.  Why be Jewish?  Because I want a life of meaning and a world of meaning, and Judaism is how we Jews get there.

There’s one last reason I want to share with you tonight.  Like some of the other answers, it is not, in and of itself, sufficient.  But if Judaism is to continue to play a role in advocating for fundamental human rights, in providing a foundation for human morality, in infusing our lives with meaning, this answer is crucial:  Why be Jewish?  Because the future of Judaism depends on it.

It’s a heavy responsibility.  Sometimes difficult to bear.  But it’s the truth.  The future of Judaism depends on you.  And it’s not just about your children or your grandchildren – though, to be sure, it’s about them, too – but it’s about you.

Why be Jewish?  Because only through your conscious, thoughtful efforts will this tradition of ours continue.  And I know that that matters to each and every one of you, or you wouldn’t be here tonight.  You wouldn’t bother.  Your being here tonight is necessary for the continuation of Judaism and the Jewish people.  But let’s be honest – we all know it’s not sufficient.  One day a year, two days a year won’t do it.  Kind of caring about being Jewish won’t do it.  If the continuation of Judaism really matters to us – if we really do want it for our children and our grandchildren – well, then like anything else we really want for them, our behavior and our choices will have to demonstrate it.

The very survival of our people’s noble heritage depends upon our being good Jews.  And by that, what do I mean?  Well, in the words of Elie Wiesel, a good Jew is any Jew who is trying to be a better Jew.  Not a better person, mind you, though being a good Jew will help you be a better person.  But a good Jew is one who strives to be a better Jew.

In this New Year, let us be good Jews by trying to be better Jews.  By trying to be more just, more righteous, more loving, more compassionate than we were last year.  Let’s be good Jews by learning a little more seriously, by giving a little more freely, by connecting a little more deeply with this amazing community of ours.

Let’s be good Jews by committing ourselves more fully to those unique Jewish acts that make us into vessels of justice and holiness:  observing Jewish time through Shabbat and holidays; celebrating Jewish culture in the way we eat, sing, and dance; cherishing Jewish wisdom in the books we read, the classes we attend, and the languages we speak.

Why be Jewish?  Because Jewish wisdom and Jewish community help me to be a better person than I am capable of being on my own.

Why be Jewish?  Because being Jewish enriches my life in ways I can’t fully explain.  And in the most difficult, overwhelming moments of my life, I can be sure that my Judaism and my Jewish community knows what to do, how to help, how to support, what to say, what not to say.

I love being Jewish.  You want your rabbi to feel this way.  But I am certain that this tradition and this community has so much to offer you, too.  And I know that Judaism has something irreplaceable to offer the larger world.  Good Jews have made this world a better place time and time again.  Our history books testify to it.  Good Jews bring us all closer to the time of redemption. Will we do our part?  Will we sustain the story?

Jewish philosopher Will Herberg wrote in our time about the dangers of “cut-flower ethics” – the too-common attempt to carry forward the ethics of Judaism without the Judaism. “Cut flowers,” wrote Herberg, “retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

Why be Jewish?  Because our gift to ourselves, our descendants and all of humankind must be more than a glorious display of cut flowers.  Our gift deserves to last.

These days, I don’t often hear, “Hey, Rabbi Chasen, you’re Jewish, right?”  Nobody seems to ask anymore.  But I suspect that some of you hear that question.  Maybe at work or in social settings.  Maybe your kids hear it from time to time in school.  Your answers – what you say… what you do… how you live – will determine whether the flower of Judaism will see any water or sunlight in this generation… or the next. Our souls, our kids, our congregation, our country, our world – they’re looking to us for more than a withering bouquet.

The water, the light, the nutrients and perhaps most importantly, the gardeners – everything that's needed for that flower to flourish is in this room.  I'll see you in the garden.

(This sermon was written collaboratively with Rabbi Josh Zweiback of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills , California .)