Holy Time Part II
Rosh Hashanah Sermon Day 2, 5772/2011
Delivered by Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

A poor Jew from a small European shtetl once dreamed that there was a great treasure under a bridge in the great city of Vienna. He traveled to Vienna and stood near the bridge, trying to figure out what to do. An officer passed by and asked him, “Jew, what are you doing here?” The man decided to tell the whole story to the officer, hoping that he would help him find the treasure. The officer listened to the whole story and replied, “A Jew is concerned only with dreams! I also dreamed of finding treasure. It was in a small house under the cellar.” The officer described the small house in detail, and the Jew realized that it was his house that the officer was describing. He rushed home, dug under the cellar, and found the treasure. He said, “Now I know that I had the treasure all along. But in order to find it, I had to travel to Vienna.”
All too often, we travel at great lengths to find treasure, but after our long journey, we realize that the true treasures of life are found in the place we least expect it, our hearts and our homes.
Yesterday, I spoke about the concept of holy time in our Jewish calendar. Our calendar, the first mitzvah we were given as a people, has allowed us to bring God into our lives by dwelling in His sanctuary.
Our Torah tells us that the place where we will offer our sacrifices will be the place where God chooses to place His name, the place where His presence dwells. For years, this was the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, and later, our Holy Temple. But the Temple was destroyed, and with it, seemed like God lost His place.
It was after the moment of destruction that time became the center of our lives, not space.
But where else does God dwell?
There is a famous line in the Torah when God tells the Israelites to build Him a sanctuary.
Leviticus Verse 25:8 God says “And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” This is a strange wording because the text should say: let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell upon it. Our commentators see that this is a reference to God residing in our people’s hearts, among them.
We are the sanctuaries that God dwells upon.
Yesterday, I spoke about the minutes in a year, Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred minutes in a year. We strive to dwell in God’s sanctuary, but we are not always in synagogue, there are not always holidays to celebrate. Most of the time, we are living in Chol, the mundane, not in Kodesh, the holy.
One of my favorite ceremonies in Judaism is Havdallah, the separation from Kodesh to Chol, from the holy to the regular. Our Rabbis envisioned this ceremony to occur in the home, not in the synagogue. In this ceremony, we bless wine, spices that give off a pleasant odor, and fire.
Our first blessing is over an overfilled glass of wine. Our cup overflows with the hope that blessings will pour out into our homes.
The second blessing, over the spices, are like smelling salts. The sweetness of the spices wake us up from the slumber of Shabbat. When we smell them, we are refreshed and ready to take on the world.
Finally, we recite the blessing Borei Meoreh HaEish over the flame of a candle – blessed is God, the creator of the lights of fire.
We light the Shabbat candles to bring peace into our homes, Shalom Bayit, on the even of Shabbat and holidays, but the light we kindle for Havdallah is different– it is a flame, a candle made up of numerous wicks. This fire is more then peace, it is about comfort, warmth, and confidence that we do not have to be afraid because God is with us.
This ceremony tells us:
LIFE IS NOT ALL ABOUT THE HOLY DAYS, THE KODESH, IT’S ALSO ABOUT CHOL, THE DAILY MINUTES WE TAKE FOR GRANTED.
I asked you yesterday to take a step into our sanctuary to celebrate our holy times together which would bring us into God’s sanctuary.
Today, I want to give you a different message.
Today, I want to ask you to do something else – to bring God into your sanctuary, your home, your life, your heart, the minutes of your every day life. The places where you think God is off limits, but these are the places where you need God the most.
288 minutes – the length of an average baseball game.
I took a class on ethical wills, an ancient Jewish practice, as a rabbinical student. Our tradition tells us that there is more to pass on to our children than just material possessions, so they devised ethical wills to pass on the immaterial; the values and ethics that guide our lives and the hope that our children would take on their morals and values to pass on to their children.
In this class, one of our teachers, told us a story that I will never forget regarding his own ethical will. He wrote an ethical will for his son. In his will, he recalled an event in his life that troubled him decades later, and he contacted his son 40 years later about this moment: Son, do you remember what happened when you were ten years old? His son answered, “Yes, I do. That was when you stood me up before my first baseball game.”
Years ago, this Rabbi promised his son that for his 10th birthday, he would take him and his friends to his first baseball game. For months, his son counted down the days, and finally, that Sunday came. It was on that Sunday morning when the Rabbi received a call from a congregant. Rabbi, our father has died, we need you to officiate at his funeral today at 12:30 pm. The problem was that the baseball game was during this same time.
The Rabbi had to make a choice, and so, in an instant, he chose the funeral. I asked him if he asked the family to change the time of the funeral. He did not. It was not that he was afraid of losing his job. Instead, it was ego. He thought only I could officiate at this funeral.
His sin was that he thought of himself only as the Rabbi. He did not realize that another Rabbi could have stepped in, but no one else could have stepped in to be his son’s father.
I will never forget what he did at the end of the lesson, “Rabbotai, I chose the funeral, and it is something that stuck with my son 40 years later. My students, if you are ever given the same choice, choose the baseball game.”
The choice between family and other aspects of our life is nothing new. In fact, we read today about another choice that our forefather, Avraham once made. In today’s torah reading we read the famous story, the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. It is one of the shortest accounts of a story in the Bible, only 19 lines long, and yet, it is a story that is ingrained in us.
One can look at this as a horror story. Abraham and his wife Sarah struggled with infertility for so long, and they were finally blessed with a son. God calls out to him, “Avraham, take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.”
How many of us know someone, or ourselves, have struggled with infertility? When I think of Avraham and Sarah’s struggles, I think of a one of my cousins. His young wife had cancer, and thank God, she survived the treatment, but it came at a cost: she was left without the ability to have children. They went through surrogacy, and after many years and dollars, they finally had a child. It warms my heart to see the way they look at their child; he is their gift from God.
Now, imagine that you are told to sacrifice this child. One would think that the battle of all battles would ensue! But in our story, in the Akeidah, the father, Avraham is silent.
God could have just said your son, but he drives it home to him, it is your only son, the one who you love, and then, he says his name, Yitzhak.
It is almost as if God wants Avraham to debate him – but God is met by silence, and the silence is deafening.
You may say, in the modern world, I would never do such a thing, I would never sacrifice my own blood for anything!
That’s what I thought after the Rabbi told me his story, I would never make that mistake, but a couple weeks ago, I experienced my own moment of silence.
My two year old son, ironically named Avraham, was tugging at my pants trying to get my attention, but I was on my Iphone answering email, so I turned on the television for him.
My wife saw this and stopped me, “Would you take a couple of minutes to play with your son.” It began a debate within myself. At first I fought it, “this is our livelihood, it’s my job to answer email.” But was it really? When I am at home, shouldn’t my job be to play with my child, my only child, the one whom I love?
And yet, how many minutes do we sacrifice for our children so that we can have more money and possessions? Abraham was asked to sacrifice for God, but how many of us sacrifice for our bosses, or the news, or television?
There are so many times that we are confronted with choices: between work and family, between space and time. All of us want to call ourselves noble and say that we would choose family over work at all times, but in reality, it is usually the other way around, and it never happens with a loud fight, but with silence.
If your boss invites you over for a barbeque, but it is during your son’s play off game, which one do you choose? Many of us would say, well, in this rough economy, if I want my son to continue having playoff games, I better go to the barbeque.
The truth is, sometimes, our families will understand our dilemma, they may even forgive us, but it does not mean they will forget.
We make these important decisions in our lives, every day, on a moments notice. Like Avraham, when it comes to our families, sometimes we don’t even debate the choices.
God wants you to debate, God wants you to fight for your family.
Do not sacrifice the innocent; do not sacrifice your family without a debate, without a fight.
There is a battle going on in our lives, between space/materials, and time.
Time goes by, and we cannot collect it or make more of it. We can always gain more possessions though, and through it, gain control over space.
But will space and possessions make us truly happy?
There was an editorial in the NY Times that I highly recommend by David Brooks. In this article, Brooks spoke about a safari in Africa that he went on with his family. His family stayed in two different camps: an elegant camp and a simple camp. The elegant camp was more expensive, and with the higher price came your own dinner table, and your tents were secluded from the others. The higher price gave you more space. The simpler camps did not have the luxuries of the elegant camps like running water. At the simpler camps, the guests all ate at one table and people got to know each other – they had more time together.
He wrote, “I know only one word to describe what the simpler camps had and the more luxurious camps lacked: haimish. It’s a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality. It occurred to me that when we moved from a simple camp to a more luxurious camp, we crossed an invisible Haimish Line. The simpler camps had it, the more comfortable ones did not.”
Our society as a whole went through such a phenomena. When Americans started making more money, they left the crowded cities neighborhoods where people hung out on stoops and children played together for the suburbs where each family had their own private space but were less likely to know their neighbors.
When we get more means, it seems we automatically feel we must conquer more space.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel spoke about this struggle, between space and time. He once wrote, “Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.
But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames.”
All the money and possessions in the world won’t win your family’s affection, and using it for that purpose only adds fuel to the flame.
What they really want is your time.
In his article, David Brooks writes about how we choose our vacations. He writes that we primarily think about WHERE we will take our vacation as we look at the travel company brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.
I like to look at this idea of a vacation as a metaphor for our lives. If God were our travel agent, would we want Him to show us brochures of the houses we will live in, the material things we will own, or would we want God to show us the people who we will have in our lives?
When I walk through cemeteries, as Rabbis, we do this more than most people, I often read the gravestones. Out of all the gravestones I have seen in my life, and I have seen many, I have never seen ‘Here lies Moshe, he owned a 5,000 square foot home or ‘he had three BMWs’ inscribed on a grave stone. What I do see is, here lies Moshe or Miriam, beloved mother or father, grandfather or mother, great-grandfather/mother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, and friend.
We might be able to possess more and more things, but these things are fleeting, as Heschel told us, they are not fire proof.
Now, HaYom, today, is the time to start mastering your time, your minutes.
You cannot create more of it, but you do have a lot of them: 525,600 minutes.
Yesterday, Liza Schwartzwald sang the words from the musical “Rent”. The song ends with the answer to how we measure our moments in life; we measure them in love. The song ends with the words, “You know that love is a gift from up above, Share love, give love, spread love, measure your life in love.”
God gave us the gift of time, every year, and asks us to add the ingredient of love, and share it with others.
This year, I want all of you to do one thing: hold that Haimish line. Hold it in every one of the Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred minutes that you are blessed with.
These minutes are the treasure that you seek, and they are not hard to find, just look in your homes, in your hearts.
This New Year, 5772, is the time to let God dwell in these places.

Shalom Shaarei Kodesh,

It is great to be back in South Florida! Last week, I attended the AIPAC National Policy conference along with 14 fellow congregants in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Although the speeches made news, I think the real story was the size and scope of the conference. It was the largest policy conference ever with 10,000 supporters of Israel in attendance, and it was amazing to see so many people of such diverse backgrounds dedicated to the support of the American and Israeli relationship. I would say that it was one of the largest gathering of Jews in the U.S., but there were actually a number of non-Jewish supporters of Israel. There is so much more that I can say about the conference, but you can watch the speeches and see the pictures first hand by visiting the policy conference web site. I highly recommend the AIPAC policy conference which occurs annually in Washington, D.C.

This week, we are continuing with our final installment of our ethical wills class taught by Rabbi Jack Riemer. Tonight we are focusing on writing our own ethical wills so we hope you can join us at CSK at 7:30 pm for an hour and a half that will change your life.

This Shabbat, we are having our annual Camp Send Off Shabbat. Overnight camping has been an important part of America for a while, but Jewish overnight camping has also been an important part of American Judaism for over 70 years. As many of you know, I was a staff member at Ramah Darom for nine summers and Ramah has played a huge role in my development in almost all facets of my life. As many of you know, Alissa and I began our relationship at Ramah (you can read about it on the Ramah website). You can read about more about my experience at Ramah in the book, Ramah At 60: Impact and Innovation.  Jewish camping is emerging as one of the most effective ways to strengthen Jewish identity and there are studies to prove it! I am so proud that many of our children are attending a Jewish overnight camp and to mark this special occasion in their lives, we are gathering for a dinner this Friday night (hot dogs and hamburgers of course) and we are inviting our children up to receive a special blessing on Shabbat morning. We hope you can attend to see our children off.

Shabbat Shalom, and I look forward to greeting you as you enter our gates of holiness at Shaarei Kodesh.

Rabbi David Baum

Taking the Middle Path Together: Parashat Behukkotai 5771/2011

Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

Does anyone know what March 21, 2011? An evangelical group is predicting that tomorrow, May 21, 2011 is the rapture and end of the world. They say, correctly, that it’s the anniversary of the beginning of the flood of Noah, and according to the way they count it, it’s the 7000^th anniversary since the flood, corresponding to “one sabbath” of 1000 year periods. Today, the rapture begins.

It turns out that we are all still here, so we’ll have to wait until 2012 for the Aztec prophesy to worry about the end of the world.

But it got me thinking, if it was the end of the world, would I really be writing a sermon the day before? What should I be doing?

Pirkei Avot tells us: Repent (do tesuvah) one day before you die. If the whole world was going to end, it would be wise for all of us to do tesuvah a day before we die, perhaps a communal tesuvah. So what would WE, the Jewish community, need to work on?

The last couple of weeks, if not months, have been tumultuous. We have natural disasters interact with man made disasters such as in Japan with the nuclear reactor which melted down because of a tsunami. In our country, something that we are not talking about enough, there has been flooding due to the Mississipi river over flowing and tornados in parts of the South that has lead to hundreds of deaths and thousands of people losing their homes and farm lands.

But it is not just in the natural world that we worry. Just yesterday, President Obama made a speech on the Arab Spring and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace process. From the emails that I have been getting, it seems like ‘the end of the world is near’.

I want to state publicly that I am not a policy expert. One of the blessings of the internet is that we have so much information at our fingertips. One of the curses of the internet, is that we have so much information at our fingertips! Sometimes, we think that we are the experts because we have the knowledge, or what we think is knowledge. I almost always refrain from giving policy opinions here, and I choose to learn from experts which I and 15 congregants will do next week at the AIPAC policy conference in DC. I am not going to talk about the specifics of President Obama’s speech, but I do want to talk about how WE, the Jewish community, have acted.

Our parashah, the last parashah of Leviticus, Be-hukkotai. This parashah is the last message that we get at Sinai. We are still in the second year after the Exodus as not much time has passed. We are receiving rules and a way of life that will guide us not only for the next 38 years, but for all time.

Our parashah gives us a choice – if you follow my laws and commandments, you will get reward, but if you disobey, you will be punished. As you read, the punishments are really harsh and it sounds like living in the end of the world. But I want to focus on the reward. The text states:

3If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, 4I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit. 5Your threshing shall overtake the vintage, and your vintage shall overtake the sowing; you shall eat your fill of bread and dwell securely in your land.

6I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled by anyone; I will give the land respite from vicious beasts, and no sword shall cross your land

The rewards given are material, water, crops, peace in the land, safety from enemies, and fertility. Only once is a spiritual reward given when the Torah states that God will be ever present in our midst, literally walking among us all.

Maimonides wisely states that the text states so much about the material because we need to be healthy to enjoy the real spiritual reward. These material things are an ends to a mean. But as I read these rewards, I realized that there is something spiritual about them.

Verse 4 tells us something very interesting about how God will give us rain, in its proper time (B’Ita). Why is this important? We know that the one element needed for life is water, so water is life, but as we saw this week, water could also be death. Food can be in abundance, but water needs to be given in the right amount, not too much, and not too little. So how can we live our lives with enough water to keep us alive and yet not drown us?

Our Rabbis often equated water to Torah because they both give life, and we as Jews should base our lives on Torah which is what our parashah tells us will bring blessing. Torah is not just a book, it’s how we act in this world.

Maimonides spoke about this in his law code, the Mishnah Torah, Hilchot De’ot, the laws of personal development. These laws tell us of different types of people, the extremes. He gives us a couple of examples: a wrathful man who is constantly angry or the calm person who is never moved to anger. The man filled with pride and the person who is humble to the extreme. A person who is ruled by his physical appetites and can never be satisfied and the person who totally ignores the needs of his body for the spiritual. There is [the miser,] who torments himself with hunger, gathering [his possessions] close to himself. Whenever he spends a penny of his own, he does so with great pain. [Conversely,] there is [the spendthrift,] who consciously wastes his entire fortune.

Maimonides tells us that you do not have to choose between the two, rather, you should take the middle path, the Derech Yesharah. This means that you should not be overly angry, but also should have passions at times. You should give a relative amount of tzedakah, but you have to make sure that you will live. Maimonides tells us that we have to study our behaviors in order to find the middle path. It is a life long process, and some of these traits might not come natural, so you have to learn how to develop them. Some of these traits might be all too natural, so you have to learn how to control them.

Being in the middle doesn’t seem to be the trend nowadays. If you compromise, you are looked at as weak. But the middle is actually the best place to be. Only a person in the middle can reach out to both the right and left because there is not too much distance between them. Being in the middle harder than the other paths because it is constant work, but it is the only way to sustain life and bring peace.

This week, many are focused on President Obama’s speech, but in the coming weeks and months, we will be hearing about various peace plans by Jews. I have stated before that the labels that we as Jews are giving each other regarding Israel is dangerous. If you agree with my position, you are pro-Israel, but if you disagree, you are anti-Israel.

Listening to a fellow Jew who disagrees with you about your stance on Israel is not easy. You can either push them away or bring reach your hand out to them. But this is harder to do when you are far away.

In the coming years, Israel must be a uniting issue, not divisive.

If we only had a couple of days, I would not want to spend them fighting. I would like to spend them in the middle where I can hear all sides to a debate, and where everyone’s views can be freely expressed. Each one of you will have this choice when you walk out of hear today. You can choose to delete the extremist email that demonizes fellow Jews who disagree with you. You can be the voice of unity and reasoning in a lively discussion. It is up to each one of us to take this difficult middle path.

The middle path, just enough water, but not too much, is the way in which we walk in God’s path. It will bring us reward, and ultimately, it will help us grow- both physically and spiritually.

Parashat Behar:  Redeeming the Land Of Israel In Our Time

By Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh, 2011

This past week, we celebrated the 63^rd birthday of the Modern State of Israel. The shape of Israel is ingrained in all of our heads, but by the news coverage, one would think that it is a huge piece of land. As many of you know, it is a small piece of land that is about the size of the 5^th smallest state, New Jersey. There is a famous joke that former prime minister Golda Meir said at a dinner honoring West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1973, “Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”

The ‘choice’ of where the Jewish state would be established has always interested me. Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, met with Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, in the spring of 1903 asking him for land to build a Jewish state. Chamberlain offered Herzl the Guas Ngishu plateau near Nairobi in East Africa – not Uganda, as Chamberlain and others later erroneously called it – for a Jewish settlement under the British flag. Herzl had always had Palestine in mind, but this was a big step for the Zionists movement because they were finally being recognized by a world power.

Herzl did not expect the the storm that erupted during the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903. Different opinions started developing about where the Jewish state should be, and things started becoming much more real. Was Zionism about the land, specifically, Palestine, or was it about the people and could happen anywhere? There were those interested in Jewish nationhood rather than Jewish land, and there were various plans put forth. For example, there was talk of a Jewish settlement in Texas! By the 7^th Zionist Congress, the talk of building the state outside of Palestine mostly went away, and in 1917, Zionism found with the Balfour Declaration which concluded that a Jewish homeland would be in the area known as Palestine.

For 2,000 years, we read about the land, learned about the land, and dreamed about the land, but we did not have the land. How we lived became of upmost importance, and we did not spend much time thinking about where we lived. Our lands were temporary, we became history’s nomads, but that exile officially ended in 1948. In theory, this exile could have ended before this time. We could have been in Uganda, so why did we have to wait?

Today, I want to start before 1948, before the Temple, back to a time when we did not have a land.

In our parashah this week, B’har, we receive laws concerning the land such as the smittah year, the seventh year where we must let the land rest, and the Jubilee year where we return the land to their original owners, and we are also commanded to redeem the land. But this parashah is not just about the land itself, but how we should act on the land. We are given laws about how to treat our fellow Jew, both rich and poor, within the land as well as our servants who are not Israelites.

The rabbis looked at these laws and assigned a quality to the land: Kadosh, or Eretz Kedushah – holy land.

There is a famous text about the levels of holiness in Judaism regarding the land of Israel. The mishnah states that there are ten degrees of holiness, and the land of Israel is more holy than all the lands, and they define holiness by what you have to do in Israel that you cannot do outside of Israel. The examples used are the crops that you bring to God only in Israel. The holiness begins in the center, in the holy of holies, in Jerusalem, and it spreads outward, like a series of concentric circles.

These acts that we perform, the mitzvoth that we cannot perform anywhere else, is the basis for our relationship with God.

I know, holiness and mitzvoth are not terms that resonates with us. It’s not just about mitzvoth, but about our presence, our footprints, on the land.

Eight years ago, a friend who was studying with me at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem told me the story of his first visit to the kotel. He was born in Columbia and grew up a religious Catholic (he almost became a monk!). One day, he found out from his grandfather that his ancestors were Bnei Anusim, Spanish Jews who hid their Judaism during the inquisition that began in Spain in the 1400′s and followed them to the ‘New World’ in Columbia. This revelation changed his life. He left the ‘seminary’ and started studying philosophy. One day, he and his girlfriend went on a trip across the world, and she wanted to visit Israel. He went and they visited the various holy sites of the three faiths. He felt nothing until he went to the kotel. At the kotel, he broke down, sobbing as he realized that he was finally coming home. For hundreds of years, his family hid their true identity, and he brought it back. Juan began his Judaic studies and continued them at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is name called Rabbi Juan Mejia, and has devoted his life to the Torah education of both Jews and descendants of anusim wherever they may be.  He lives with his wife and daughter in Oklahoma City, OK.  He was recently appointed as the coordinator for the Southwest for the Jewish non-profit organization Bechol Lashon. From his story you can see the power of the land of Israel on Jews.

My father in law has never been a deeply religious man, but he felt something deeply spiritual when he went on the tunnel tours in Jerusalem. These tours take you underground below the kotel and closest to the actual holiest place in judaism. After this tour, we put on tefilin together at the kotel. The history mixing with his faith led him to feel something he had never felt before – something very holy.

The connection between what we did on the land and our presence there is one and the same.

This week, we celebrated the 63^rd birthday of the modern state of Israel. Many of us do not know of a world without a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland. The last generation grew up looking at Israel as a miracle, repelling attacks from 7 Arab nations in 1948, repelling a greater force in just 6 days in 1967. As Israel became more established, we have taken it for granted. This generation is growing up with the Lebanon wars, the Intifada, and terrorism.

Some Jews are asking, what do we need this for? We can be Jews here can’t we? We can own land somewhere else, can’t we?

As we have seen, the idea of land ownership has been flipped upside in our neighborhood. Florida is one of the foreclosure capitals of the U.S. It is not a given anymore that you will own land.

God tells us in our parashah this week the following:

23But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.

24Throughout the land that you hold, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

The land is only ours because God gave it to us. Part of that deal was that we redeem the land. What does it mean to ‘redeem’ the land? Our commentators said that we have to have a presence within the land and that means that redemption is an ongoing process.

Israel is not perfect – there are amazing things happening in Israel. It is the only true democracy in the Middle East and leads the middle east in all freedoms, it is at the forefront of developing new technologies and leads the world in start up companies; but there are also major problems. Israel is 4^th in the world disparity between rich and poor, while the U.S. Is 3^rd. There might be religious freedom for non-Jews, but we have yet to have freedom of religion for all streamlines of Judaism in Israel. Of course, we have yet to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. I could have went on and on with Israel’s achievements, but I can also add to the things that Israel needs to work on.

You know what, that’s ok.

In the prayer for the state of Israel we say words that should not be taken lightly, Barech et Midinat Israel, Reshi Zmichat Geulatenu. God, bless the modern state of Israel the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.

Our redemption and Israel’s redemption goes hand in hand – one will lead to another. But we need all Jews to help in this holy cause.

My hope for the 63^rd birthday of Israel is that we Jews in America will come together, that we can stop using the terms pro and anti-Israel when referring to each other.

My hope is that the Jews living in America and in Israel take the task of redeeming the land to heart, to realize that Israel is the only place on earth where we can truly be free, where we can truly be holy.

I would like to end with words from an ethical will written by Dvora Waysman which can be found in the book, So That Your Values Live On:  Ethical Wills and How To Prepare Them by Rabbi Jack Riemer.  Dvora is a distinguished writer in Israel, who made aliyah with her family from Australia. In her will, she explains that had they stayed in Australia, she could have given them riches, but now that they are Israeli, she has something else to give them, a gift that all us have, if we choose it.

Ethical Will of Dvora Waysman

We have had a tremendous week at Shaarei Kodesh!  Many of us fulfilled the mitzvah of honoring and revering our mothers (or others’ mothers) on Mothers Day this Sunday.  Our students at the Ruth and Lewis Davis Religious School learned about this important mitzvah by making chocolate roses for their parents.  On Tuesday, the world celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day which became a theme at Shaarei Kodesh.  On Tuesday morning, we gathered together in our annual special prayer service with Hallel in honor of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) morning minyan followed by an Israeli Breakfast and learning session about Israel.  I would like to publically thank Amy Pessah and Ariela Ushpiz for preparing an authentic and delicious Israeli breakfast that you would think was prepared in Tel Aviv.  I would like to take this opportunity to wish a nesiah tovah (bon voyage) to Eli, Ariela, Gil and Noa Ushpiz who will be moving back to Medinat Israel (the state of Israel).  They have been members of Shaarei Kodesh the past couple of years and have served as amazing shilichim (messengers) from Israel, teaching us valuable lessons about living in the Jewish state.  They have told me on many occasions that they view our congregation as ‘mishpachah’ (family), so if you ever visit Israel, please contact them – it’s a mitzvah to visit your family.  Many of the children from our Bnai Mitzvah class ran a program at the Donna Klein Jewish Academy called “Israel is Real”.  I was amazed to see how our sixth graders worked hard on their projects.  Each group had a different region or city in Israel that they learned about and presented to the lower grades.  It was experiential, informative, and simply amazing.  Also, some of our young congregants are in Israel as we speak on the Donna Klein 8^th grade trip and we are hearing amazing reports from their families.

Yom Ha’atzmaut ended with a communal celebration organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the South Palm Beach Federation.  Tuesday evening brought together people from all ages and backgrounds throughout our great community to come together in celebration of a miracle in our time, the 63^rd anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel!  On Wednesday evening, our women’s group, Kol Isha, held their annual Mothers and Others Dinner which included Israeli cuisine with Israeli dancing.  I heard it was a wonderful event for all who attended!  Yasher Koach to Kol Isha, especially to its outgoing president, Carolyn Kianofsky, and its incoming president, Ellen Jadd.

It is quite fitting that this week’s parashah, Behar deals with the use and ownership of the land of Israel, as well as the rights and obligations of its inhabitants.  It is interesting that these laws were given outside of the land in preparation for entering the land, a topic I will be elaborating on during my dvar torah this Shabbat.  One of the things this parashah teaches us is that even though we may not live in Israel, the land and the modern state should be something that we always focus on, learn about, and fight for.  There are so many ways to be active when it comes to Israel, whether it is reading Israeli newspapers, giving tzedakah to causes for Israel, or attending conferences on supporting Israel.  In fact, many members of Shaarei Kodesh, myself included, will be attending the AIPAC Policy Conference on May 22 – 24 in Washington, D.C.  If you are interested in attending, please visit http://www.aipac.org/pc/, or feel free to contact me with any questions (rabbibaum@shaareikodesh.org)  There is still time and we hope you can join us for the largest policy conference ever!

We have many exciting events coming up this month, beginning with a class that Rabbi Jack Riemer and I are teaching on the subject of “Ethical Wills”.  We often talk about what material things we want to leave for our families, but what about our values?  During the two sessions, we will look at the history of Ethical Wills in Judaism as well as think about our own legacies.  Rabbi Riemer is truly an expert on the subject and it should be a great event for us.  Even if you have not RSVPed, please feel free to come to Shaarei Kodesh tonight at 7:30 pm.  On Friday night, our Bnai Mitzvah families will be coming together in celebration of the completion of the first ever “Agent 613:  Mission Mitzvah” Family Bnai Mitzvah Course.  Kol HaKavod to our families and we cannot wait to come together in simcha as a community to mark this special time in your lives.

Chag Sameach (Happy Holiday) Shaarei Kodesh, and we look forward to seeing you enter our gates of holiness.

Rabbi David Baum

Being Holy Means Being Different

by Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

For almost our whole existence in the U.S., we have strived to be a part of the melting pot. We have made it here, thrived, because we probably less different than any other group that has come here. In the U.S., there are so many religions that can live in peace as compared to other parts of the world. We have a freedom of religion that few countries have.

For years, we have been trying to get IN to parts of society that did not accept us because of our last names, or the way we looked, or talked. But those days are long gone. We are no longer viewed as the other in this country by the majority of Americans. We are no longer looked at as different.

But is this really what the Torah wants from us? Our parashah, Kedoshim, contains something very special.

The context of this statement is that the whole congregation is brought together which is a rare things that reminds us of Sinai. The Midrash asks why this line had to be spoken to the entire people? The answer given was that “most of the essential laws of the Torah can be derived from it. Rabbi Levi said: Because the ten commandments are embodied in it.”

What we read in this chapter is something called the “holiness code” and it includes much more than the ten commandments, but also discusses sacrifices, justice, caring for the poor and the infirm, treatment of women, of the elderly, food, magic, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, loving an alien as oneself.

It all begins with a command: You MUST be holy because I, your God, am holy.

(א) וַיְדַבֵּר יְקֹוָק אֶל מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר:

(ב) דַּבֵּר אֶל כָּל עֲדַת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי יְקֹוָק אֱלֹהֵיכֶם:

Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them:
You must/shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.

The command that begins all the other commands begins with relationship, the relationship between Bnai Israel, the whole community, and with God.

The JPS commentary says, “To have a close relationship with God, the people must emulate God. As one of the sages puts it: “It is comparable to the court of a king. What is the court’s duty? To imitate the king!”

Our midrash tells us what it means to actually be holy in a commentary to this verse: You shall be holy – You shall be distinct (perushim tihyeu), in other words, in order to be holy, you have to preserve your distinctiveness from other people. Because we were gathered together as a nation to accept these laws, we are also led to believe that the only way to become truly holy, truly distinct, is by acting together.

And here is where we come to an uncomfortable reality. For so many years, we were forced to be different. Jews were put into literal ghettos, parts of the town that we had to live in, or parts of the country like the Pale of Settlement in Russia, that we HAD to live in. We were told what professions we HAD to do by non-Jews. It seemed that it wasn’t God making us separate, but it was the non-Jews ruling over us.

But now, as I stated before, we are not forced to be distinct. In the past, we have battled this by trying to instill Jewish Identity and Ethnicity, but what worked in the past is not working as well for Jews today.

Here’s an example that I heard from a professor of mine during a seminar when I was in rabbinical school. He was a fundraiser for an Israeli organization, and he told us that in the 80′s, all you had to do was mention the Holocaust, Soviet Jewry and Israel and the checks would come pouring in. But it doesn’t work anymore, especially for Jewish youth. Feeling connected because of shared historical experience is not as compelling as it used to be.

And so funders are searching for the answers to what should replace the message that used to work so well for us.

The answer is not found in a new study, it’s actually found right in front of you.

The Holiness Code is the answer.

Let’s read it with a different lens. God brings us all together and pleads with us, begs us, “My people, you MUST be holy because I am holy. I am holy, I am different, because of the things that I do. And I want you to help me do these things. I might declare the Shabbat as holy, but it is you, my people who have to MAKE it holy.

The answer is to be different, but not necessarily to look different on the outside, to dress differently, rather, we have to act differently as a people and as individuals.

I think we have a unique challenge ahead of us that few generations had before.

Jews, young and old, are connecting less and less to the physical connection of who we are and what we went through. Monday is Yom HaShoah. We are the last generation who will have met a holocaust survivor first hand. We made have all heard the familiar slogan, Never Forget, Never Again, but we have never fully explored WHY we should never forget. It cannot be just for us, so that this does not happen to US again. What is moving young people is the greater purpose, Never Forget so that genocide and hate will never happen to another group EVER again.

This is why AJWS, not any other organization, organized the first rally for Darfur which I attended years ago in Washington DC. It was Jews who first stood up to the genocide in Darfur.

And we gathered together, as Jews at that rally not just because we experienced hate, but because of the Holiness code.

Leviticus 17 and 18

17 You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him.

18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord.

We live in an age where you can be cruel to your neighbor, where we can HATE our neighbor, without even meeting him, where you can hate someone because of something you read about them on the internet without trusting the source. We live in a time when you can insult your neighbor publicly without ever leaving your home or even letting them know who you are.

Leviticus 19:32 You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

We live in a time where people feel no need to care for the elderly, to show respect to them.

Leviticus 19:33 – When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. 34The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.

We live in a time where it has become acceptable to wrong the strangers in our land, to outwardly hate them and be praised for it.

These aren’t just nice things to do, they are things we MUST do! God is pleading with us to do them and when we do these things it changes our hearts and the way we think.

At our sedar, the Rasha, the wicked son asks, “What is this service to YOU, to you, not to himself because he excludes himself from the group.

At our Snack and Learn, we learned that the Rasha is not just one child, but a part of every Jew. For this generation, both young and old, a compelling answer to something is no longer because this is what your father and mother did, so you’ll do it too.

The question isn’t, what is this service to YOU? What they are really asking is, what is this going to do for me, what do I get out of it?

This code, this Torah, this way of life that God and our Rabbis put before us, this will save you, it will make you different and it will make you holy, and it will heal this world.

The bad news is that we have to change the way we have been thinking for the last 50 years…the good news is, we have to get back to the way we have been thinking for 3,000 years.

Being holy means being different.

The answers are right in front of us, they have always been there, and God is asking us, are we ready to be holy?

I am writing this letter to you today in the midst of a little known fast, the Fast of Esther which occurs this year on Thursday, March 17th. There are four minor fasts in our tradition that begin at sunrise and end at sunset (although recently, some Jews follow the practice of breaking the fast at the earliest time when one can recite the Minha service in the afternoon – Minhah Gedollah). Three of these fasts deal with the destruction of the Temple and tragedies to the ancient Jewish state/kingdom of Israel, The 17th of Tammuz, the 10th of Tevet, and the Fast of Gedaliah, and these fasts are mentioned by the prophet Zechariah. However, the fourth minor fast, the Fast of Esther, is unrelated to these other fasts and is only mentioned in the Megillah of Esther.

There are various reasons for this fast and fasts in general. Fasting offers us time for self reflection as we remember difficult times, and they affect not only our behaviors, but the way we think. Our Rabbis gave us some reasons for this fast such as the common practice of fasting before a battle or in a state of war, or that it was a reaction to the over indulgence of Purim. However, if we look at the actual text of the Megillah, we see a glimpse into why we fast. After Mordechai informs Esther of Haman’s plans, Esther tells Mordechai, “Go, assemble all the Jews who live in Shushan, and fast in my behalf; do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my maidens will observe the same fast.”

As I read this text, and Esther’s plea to the people to fast for her, I see a sense of peoplehood and solidarity. We have taken this fast and applied to ourselves as a form of solidarity with Jews of past, present, and future. It is a way for us to physically say that we as Jews stand together.

I bring this up to highlight a tragedy that befell our people this week. Five members of the Fogel family who lived in the West Bank settlement of Itamar were murdered as they slept in their home by terrorists last week. The dead include Ruth Fogel (35), Udi Fogel (36.5), Elad (4), Yoav (11), and Hadas (3 months). There are those in the Jewish community who differ on their opinions about the settlements, however, this tragedy is not part of that debate. If this holiday teaches us anything, it is that all Jews are responsible for one another; we are one people. This week, we lost members of our family.

When we abstain from food and drink, we feel empty inside, an emptiness that comes when facing adversity or fear. But throughout the day, in order to compensate for a lack of food which affects the physical, we begin to fill ourselves up with the spiritual. We gather together in prayer and cry out to Our Father, Our King (Avenu Malkenu) to act in compassion, to have mercy on us and help us, and finally, to answer us. By the end of the day, we are ready to once again step back into the physical, but keep the lessons we have learned through our fast.

On Saturday night, Jews around the world will gather in synagogues to read the Megillah, dance, sing, eat delicious foods, and generally be happy. It is hard to go from sadness to happiness, from fast to feast, and yet, this is what we do during this holiday. We hope that the sadness and the suffering that we might experience as we heard about the Fogel family, and as we hear about those suffering in Japan, will eventually bring a time when there is an end to evil and suffering.

Have an easy fast, and after that, have a joyous feast.
Chag Purim Sameach,

Rabbi David Baum

Failure Must Be An Option
Parashat Pekudei, 5771/2011
Delivered by Rabbi David Baum

Close your eyes and think about your biggest regret, your biggest failure. When we think about it, it doesn’t fill us with a warm feeling does it.

Humanity was blessed with the gift of memory. Our brains have the power to hold our experiences in our minds for future use, but this gift comes with a price. Because we can have memory, we also live with regret. Sometimes, it could be the fork in the road where we went right instead of left. Sometimes it is something we did or experienced that we hold with us to our detriment. Often times, we look at these things we hold as failures, and we obsess over them, and sometimes, it paralyzes us.

So what do we do with the things that bring us down, the things that we have no use for anymore? We live in a world, now more than ever, when we dispose of things we no longer need. Our milk used to be delivered to us in glass bottles and we gave them back to be refilled again, but now we buy them in disposable plastic or paper containers. I remember having a rotary phone in my home when I was growing up. That phone lasted for years and if I plugged it in, it would still work! I cannot say the same for the portable phones that we started buying. They often did not last for more than two years. Either they broke, stopped working like they used to, or a new phone came out – so in the garbage it went.

I can picture an old man sitting on a porch saying, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!” To a certain degree, it’s true. Whether we throw it away, or recycle them, we have become accustomed to throwing out the things in our lives that are broken.

In this week’s parashah, Pekudai, the last parashah of the book of Exodus, we see the completion of the newest innovation for Bnai Israel – the mishkan. This new technology would now allow God’s physical presence to be with the people at all times in the center of their camp. One would think that it would have to perfect, and in most ways, it was. In the last couple of weeks, we have read about the extreme detail that went into the building of this structure. The greatest minds of the people worked on it and everyone contributed their money and hard work to its creation. But there is an interesting moment in its completion that our Rabbis picked up on.

In chapter 40, God tells Moshe, “2On the first day of the first month you shall set up the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting. 3Place there the Ark of the Pact, and screen off the ark with the curtain.”

In Hebrew, the words used for the Art of the Pact is Aron HaEdut, Edut is plural. The Rabbis of the Talmud surmised that there was more than just the whole tablets that were in the Ark, rather, there were also the broken tablets.

One of the greatest regrets or failures of Bnai Israel in the Torah, something we are reminded of numerous times a year, is the sin of the golden calf. To take us back a couple of parshiot, Moshe returned to Bnai Israel, holding the two tablets in his hand, and saw the people worshipping a Golden Calf. He was so angry at this site that he shattered the tablets on the ground. After the people repented for their sin, Moshe went back up to the mountain and received a second set of tablets. The Torah never tells us explicitly where these broken pieces went, but our Rabbis teach us a valuable lesson.

Imagine how the people felt as they worshipped at the mishkan and at the Holy Temple. They knew that in the holiest place on earth, there was a reminder of their greatest sin. Think about it like this: can you imagine if your greatest regret was a video on You Tube, and every time you turned on your computer, you had to watch it again?

It is hard to keep things with you that are broken, in fact, it’s down right un-American. If it’s broke, don’t fix it, just throw it away, or forget about it!

But we are forgetting the next part. After the tablets were broken, the people repented and new tablets were made. We fell, but then we stood up, brushed ourselves off, and marched on stronger than we were before.

The broken tablets were not so much a reminder of their greatest sin, rather, it was a reminder of their greatest triumph. They failed, in a BIG way, but then they succeeded to create a people that are still around to this day.

It’s easy to learn from a success, but much harder to learn from a mistake. We need to embrace our broken tablets, the mistakes we make, our failures, because only by embracing them can we learn from them. Thomas Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his life time. He was famously quoted about his work that it was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Perhaps Edison’s greatest invention, the incandescent light bulb, took over two years to perfect. He failed for two years to find the right kind of filament to conduct electricity. Every failure led him closer to finding the ideal filament, and finally, he found it.

‘Failure is not an option’ may look good on a T-shirt or on a quote on your Facebook page, but it is not how you should live your life. If we never fall down, how will we get up?

If failure is not an option than neither is succeeding.

One of the greatest things about our people is that we believe in redemption, Geulah. God redeemed us from slavery and brought us to freedom. God also gave us the gift of memory, not to haunt us, but to help us learn from our failures so we can succeed.

Ultimately, our task is to help God redeem this world.

My blessing for you is that you let yourself fall, but that you always raise yourself up stronger than ever. Don’t throw away your broken tablets, keep them around to remind you, that if nothing ever breaks, you can never fix it.

Members of Congregation Shaarei Kodesh joined other local volunteers to pick over 2300 lbs of tomatoes to help the less fortunate.

FEBRUARY 2011 Final

This week, we turn the page yet again and begin a new book of the Torah: Exodus. The name Exodus typifies the subject of the book – the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the beginning of the journey to Eretz Israel. The book of Exodus contains many of the highlights of our Jewish story including the fight between God and Pharaoh, the introduction of Moses, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and much more. In Hebrew, the book is named after the first significant word in the book, Sh’mot translated as ‘names’. The book begins with a repetition of the names of Jacob and his family who came from Israel to Egypt. In the time frame of the parashah, these people have long passed away. As we know, the nature of the Torah is to not give any superflous information; each word has tremendous significance. However, why does the most exciting book of the Humash begin with a repetition of names?

Rashi answers this question for us, “even though they were recorded during their lifetimes by their names, the Torah returned and recorded them after their deaths to proclaim how beloved they were.” This commentary gives us a great message: each individual, even those long gone, holds great value. As Jews, we have a tendency to honor names. Every synagogue has plaques containing names honoring people, and sometimes we gloss over the names without much thought, just as we might have glossed over the names of those listed at the beginning of our parashah. We may not know all the names on our walls, or even at the beginning of the parashah, but our tradition tells us to care about these names because they are someone else’s loved ones. It turns out that ‘names’ matter a great deal.

This Shabbat Sh’mot, the Shabbat of names, ask yourselves, what are the names of the relatives that have shaped you and your family? Does your family know about them? Sh’mot is a charge to tell us that as much as we have to look forward to our new journeys, we must also remember the journeys of our families before us. Their lives are a part of our story which is still being written.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi David Baum

Week of December 25

Shalom Shaarei Kodesh,

As you read this, you might be setting up your Hanukah candles for lighting, or perhaps you are watching the flames of the candles burning bright. The candles we light are the focus of this holiday. Our Rabbis gave us specific instructions on how, when and where to light them. Each day of the week, we add one more candle because, as Hillel told us, we add to holiness and do not take away from it. We also place our Hanukiot in the most public place in our homes and we light them at the time when the most amount of people will be walking by. This is all for one purpose: Pirsumei Nissah, in order to publicize the miracle, but which one? Are we talking about the miracle of the oil that was only supposed to last one day that lasted eight? Are we talking about the miracle of a small Jewish army led by the Maccabees defeating a much mightier force of Greeks? Are their other miracles? The answer to all these questions are, yes! Hanukah, which means to dedicate, is a time for all of us to re-dedicate ourselves to seeing the daily miracles in our lives and as a people. As you light your Hanukah candles, think about the miracles in your life, and thank God for helping them burn bright.

Just the other night, Alissa and I watched the video we took from our time living in Israel. On the seventh night of Hanukah, we took a tour of a neighborhood in Jerusalem called Nachlaot where you can see hundreds of Hanukiot in front of everyone’s home. Seeing this site, especially in our holiest city which for the first time in thousands of years is under a Jewish flag, brought the idea of miracles in our times to light (no pun intended). I share one of these pictures with you and I urge you all to continue to recognize the miracles in our lives and publicize them for the world to see!

Hag Urim Sameach – Have a Happy Hanukah, and I look forward to seeing you during our many services and programs for Hanukah at Shaarei Kodesh.

Rabbi David Baum

Please check out a new part of our website under the tab Community .  We will be helping our larger South Palm Beach Community by linking our website to the South Palm Beach Federation’s calendar.

Also, we are partnering with our local Federation on a great event called FedStock.  For every ticket you buy with the promo code CSK, our synagogue will receive 10% of the sales.

Week of Nov 13, 2010



What do you see in this picture? In this picture, I see a cassette tape and an Ipod – two generations.  One exclaiming their virtues to the other, and it got me thinking about the main character of our parashah.

Noah has quite the introduction in our parashah.

These are the records of Noah: Noah was a virtuous man. He was unblemished in his generations. Noah walked WITH God.

What is the big deal about this introduction? This is the first time in the Torah that a character is introduced with these titles of distinction. And Ish Tzadik, Tamim (pure).

But it is even more interesting because of one word used, Tamim. There is another character that is introduced in a similar way: Abraham.

יֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי אֵל שַׁדַּי הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי וֶהְיֵה תָמִים

Walk before Me and you will be Tamim (whole-hearted).

But our Rabbis like to compare people, and there is a debate: which one is better? And so there was a debate amongst our Rabbis, and I want to compress that debate in one form:

I can imagine Noah talking to Avraham in heaven saying, in my day, the people were so bad, and I was the purest of them…can you imagine if I lived in another generation? If I did, I would have been even greater!

Abraham: In my day, I was also the greatest tzadik, and the people weren’t close to as bad, had I lived in your day, I would have been an even greater righteous person than you!

Noah: In my day, I actually walked WITH God, אֶת הָאֱלֹהִים הִתְהַלֶּךְ נֹחַ:

Something I know you did NOT do. Talk about being righteous, who else could walk with God?

Abraham: That might be true, you did walk WITH God. But I walked BEFORE God.

אֲשֶׁר הִתְהַלַּכְתִּי לְפָנָיו. If you walk WITH God, you need God’s support to stand up; but me, I I actually walked BEFORE God. My own righteousness supported me. In fact, people say that I am like a prince who comes before the King to announce His presence. (Bereshit Rabah). Some even say that I am like the friend of the king. When the king walks through a dark alley, I shine a light down from a window to guide His path.

Noah: Well, in my day, the people were so bad that God destroyed the earth with a mighty flood! I rode out the flood in an ark that I built with my own two hands. I saved all the animals of the earth! If it wasn’t for me, there would be no animals, and there would be no other humans either. I am really the father of humanity, even greater than Adam. Beat that!

Abraham: Well, in my day, the people were also bad, in fact, God destroyed two whole cities by fire and brimstone. I know, it’s not the entire world, and no, I didn’t make an ark to coast above the destruction. I saved a couple of people as well, but would have survived without me, and so would the animals.

But I did something that you didn’t do: You know those wicked people, I tried to save them. I argued with God to save them, I pleaded with God. In the end, it didn’t work, I couldn’t save them…but I tried.

Noah…what did you do?

Noah: Well, I did what I was told. I made the ark, I saved the animals, but, well, I didn’t say anything. I guess I thought I did things, but at the same time…I did NOTHING.

END SCENE

There might be a debate about who was more righteous, but I think the debate hinges on one thing: who acted to save, who spoke up, and who did failed to act, who failed to say a single world while the whole world was destroyed?

In Hebrew, Noah’s name means comfort or rest. Noah silently acquiesced to God’s plan of destruction. He rested, he was silent.

Let me ask you, is that a crime? By all accounts, these people did not deserve saving. But should you be indifferent? Is that a crime?

I think so. Elie Wiesel famously said, “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.”

Noah was guilty – guilty of doing nothing.

The Torah tells us in Parashat Kedoshim that it is forbidden “to stand on the blood of your neighbor,” to remain passive while another human life is being threatened. Law after law, from the Talmud to our later law codes speaks about what you must actively do to save a life. In fact, saving a life or even extending a person’s life one moment, Pikuach Nefesh, takes precedent over even the most holiest day of the year: Yom Kippur. With very rare exception, the saving of a life supersedes all of Jewish law.

Why is that? Mishnah Sanhedrin famously says, “Anyone who saves one person, it is as if s/he has saved a whole world.” What does that really mean? We all know the potential that one life has. Can you imagine in Albert Einstein had died before he cam up with the theory of relativity? What if Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, and so many others had died in childhood? That is why the the other side is true: when we lose a life, we lose a whole world. We lose a potential world that we will never know.

This week, we witnessed a great tragedy. Tyler Clementi, a talented musician and student at Rutgers University, a young adult just 18 years old, committed suicide because he was publicly outed as a gay man, in a cruel act of webcasting a sexual encounter with another male student to the entire world on the internet. He was just one of a number of kids, all under 18, one as young as 13, who killed themselves because they were bullied by others because of their sexual preference; they were bullied for being different.

In an article in the Huffington post, Daniel Solove cites studies indicating that …more than 40% of young people claim to have been victimized by cyber bullying at some point in their lives. Countless victims suffer emotional distress, leading to mental breakdowns and a number of suicides.

It is hard for many of us to understand the world that our children live in. They are Generation Google, where their personal information is readily available for all to see. When they are bullied, it’s not just on the school bus, it’s in front of the entire school.

But all too often, we disregard this. It’s just kids being kids right?

Saying that is essentially saying, that I cannot do anything. Each one of us has the ability to stand up and act. We need to do more.

Noah was silent, and the entire world was destroyed. When we act like Noah, when we refuse to question and speak up, we are guilty of the same thing. Remember, doing nothing is actually doing something.

In light of these events that affect our families and lives, ask yourself:

What does it mean to walk with God or before God?

When we light the path for God, we step up and do the right thing. It is not the easy thing, but the right thing. Often time, it means stepping up and being brave, and others will follow.

Talk to your children and grandchildren about how they talk to others, model good behavior, light the path in front of them. Don’t walk with them, walk BEFORE them. Teach them how to be kind, not cruel. Teach teach them that there is dignity in difference, not shame.

Noah was singled out for survival, but Abraham and the Jewish people were singled out for a different purpose, for a mission. Surviving is just keeping your head down and only worrying about yourself, but having a mission, which is something that we all have as Jews, is to work not only for yourself, but for others, to care not only for yourself and your children, but for other people and their children.

Having a mission means for standing up for what is right and good.

Click here to download Rabbi Baum’s High Holiday Sermons for 5771/2010

Or Visit the Sermon section of our High Holiday web page.

Reconstructing Your World One Circle At A Time

Rosh Hashanah Sermon, Day 1 5771/2010

Delivered by Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh

On March 13th, 1964, one of one of the most infamous crimes in American history occurred in Queens, New York. At around 3 AM, 28-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was murdered as she walked from her parked car. The assault lasted thirty-five minutes and occurred outside of an apartment building where a reported 38 witnesses either heard or saw the attack and did nothing to stop it. This woman was not a celebrity; her only lasting contribution to society were the lessons learned from her death: the Genovese effect which later became called the Bystander Effect.

This phenomenon refers to cases where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.

And as we witnessed all of the turmoil this year that affected our world, our community, and our lives this year; we stood wondering, what can I do about all of this?

Most of us had to cope in some way. Perhaps we turned the channel, or perhaps we averted our eyes to look at something nicer.

And I am sure that you might have wondered, there are literally billions of people seeing what I see, but am I guilty of being a bystander? Am I ignoring the suffering that is so pervasive in the world because there are so many others who are seeing the same things that I am?

Who am I responsible for is a question that we have to answer.

On Yom Kippur, we recite many confessions, and there is one section that speaks about how we view the world.

We have sinned against you by eyes raised high (עינים רמות)– this can be interpreted to say that we choose not to look at the things that are uncomfortable to see.

This is the time to change all of that.

On our phones and computers, we have an option to return to the original factory setting with a click of a button, but it is not as easy for us.

It is time for us to do tesuvah, to return to a state that we were once in, but have forgotten after years of isolation.

So I propose a new model on how to look at your world. Draw a circle, and place yourself in it. Then draw another circle around that circle, then another, and another, and another, until you are surrounded by concentric circles.

Within each circle, you will see another part of our world, and you will be guided on how to act in this circle by our Rabbis.

Over this circle, I want you to think of this very important text by Hillel which was said in Pirkei Avot.

This text will give you direction for every circle.

These are not just any circles. They are circles of obligation, no one equal to another, but we are nevertheless bound to them.

I want to begin with the outermost circle: what is our obligation to the rest of the world?

Jews have always been a small nation of people surrounded by non-Jews, but our relationship with non-Jews was dependent on the land in which we physically lived.

But times have changed.

We live in a global world where the clothes we wear and the food we eat are no longer made in our cities and in many cases the countries we live in. Just look at your coat pockets, where were they made? How about the coffee you drank this morning, where was it grown?

Whether we like it or not, we are connected with people across the world like we never have before. So we have to ask ourselves, do we have to be for non-Jews as well?

Thousands of years ago, our Rabbis gave us the instructions on how to deal with our non-Jewish neighbors.

“For the sake of the ways of peace (מפני דרכי שלום), the poor of the idolators (non-Jews) should not be prevented from gathering gleanings, forgotten sheaves, and corners of the field. Our Rabbis taught: for the sake of the ways of peace, the poor of the idolators should be supported as we support the poor of Israel, the sick of the idolators should be visited as we visit the sick of Israel, and the dead of the idolators should be burred as we bury the dead of Israel.”

It is important to note that the text uses the term “idol worshippers” when it describes non-Jews. The rabbis of the time did not live with Christians as we understand them, and Islam had yet to become a religion. The non-Jews they lived with were pagans who opposed everything that Jews stood for, and yet, they ordered us to be at peace with them.

Darchei Shalom are paths to peace, the ways to get to peace. The way to get to peace was not through war and surrender, but through acts of kindness. By feeding, clothing, comforting, and burying non-Jews.

These are ways in which we act like God.

And so our congregation has taken up an initiative to help non-Jews in poor countries like Haiti by giving shoes to the shoe-less through the Tom’s Shoes initiative. The story of Tom’s Shoes began in 2006 when an American named Blake Mycoskie went to South American to play the dignified sport of polo, but while in Argentina, he saw a village of children without shoes. So he created a company called TOMS Shoes which would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need.

Why shoes?

Many children in developing countries grow up barefoot. Whether at play, doing chores or going to school, these children are at risk for disease. Wearing shoes can help prevent these diseases and infections, and the long-term physical and cognitive harm they cause. Often, children can’t attend school barefoot because shoes are a required part of their uniform. If they don’t have shoes, they don’t go to school, they don’t receive an education, and they don’t have the opportunity to realize their potential.

Providing shoes for children in poverty gives them a chance at success that we were given by being born here.

We ask that you go to TOM’S Shoes immediately after Shabbat and buy a pair of these shoes (use promo code chai18 to get a great discount) so you can wear them to our Yom Kippur service.

As Hillel said, “And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

You won’t bring world peace by providing shoes to the shoeless, but at least you can bring peace to one child, and who knows what can happen next?

The next circle is Israel

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.” (137, 5-7).

These words are taken from the famous Psalm, by the Rivers of Babylon which talk about the exile of the Jewish people from Israel to Babylonia. How has our view of Israel changed?

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Frank Luntz, a pollster, to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel, and the results were a wake up call.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

And so we have made a mistake because our children have forgotten Jerusalem. We forgot to teach our children that Israel is not just a country with beautiful beaches, the kotel, and shwarma. It is a place where your ancestors came from and where our descendants will live. Why do they feel this way? Perhaps they do not see themselves in Israel. How many of us have talked to our teens, or our young adults about how they see Israel?

Our children must be allowed to share their opinions even if they differ from ours. We must be open to dialogue about this our homeland, because the consequences of apathy is losing our right hands.

And to our children, I ask that you ask your parents questions about their views of Israel. Why do they feel this way? How did they feel during the Six Day War? Ask your grandparents, what was life like without a Jewish state?

We are Bnai Israel, the children of Israel. We cannot divorce our homeland from our Jewish identities.

Seeing ourselves as Israel is not a choice, it is an obligation.

If we are not for Israel, who will be?

In your Israel circle, I want you to write this line, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither,” and ask yourself if this is your truth as well.

Your next circle is devoted to COMMUNITY.

If I am only for myself, who am I?

In Pirkei Avot, we read a famous line, “Al Tifrosh Min HaTzibbur – do not separate yourself from the community”

Why can’t I separate myself from the community?

I want to share two quick stories with you about how I have experienced community this year, and both were difficult times.

I recently officiated at a funeral for a woman who was not a member of our congregation. I met with this woman’s two sons in their mother’s home and we talked for quite a while. I comforted them in any way I could and they were very grateful, but there came a moment when they asked me a very important question: What about shiva? So I told them that usually their community would provide them meals, visit them, and pray with them. They were returning to their native cities, and I asked a question: do your communities have this set up for you? They told me, Rabbi, we don’t have a community. I left speechless, and I realized how important it is to belong, to not separate yourself from the community.

But belonging to a community is not just about insurance. Last year, we had planned our fall Shabbat dinner in honor of our new members. That week, I received a call from Alissa that would change our lives, “meet me in the emergency room.” Suddenly, what was important before took a back seat to the real issue at hand: the health of our son Avi. Without going too much into detail, our son had breathing issues that could not be diagnosed by our pediatrician. I thought that we would be out of the hospital that day, but we ended up being by his side for over a week at a children’s hospital. I had written a dvar torah for this dinner that one of our congregants, Amy Pessah, agreed to read for me. That friday night, our family had Shabbat dinner in a hospital, but our congregational family was eating dinner at Shaarei Kodesh. Amy read my words of Torah and in the middle of the speech, she stopped and asked everyone to close their eyes and send their thoughts of healing to our family. Even though we were in another city, we felt their presence. Amy told me that at that moment of silence, she felt the room physically grow warm from these prayers of healing.

But it wasn’t just me, the rabbi, who has felt the warmth of this community. From births to bar mitzvahs to illnesses to unfortunate passings and everything in between, this kehillah is here for each other. We are tied together.

It is a mitzvah to be in simcha with your fellow Jew, it is a mitzvah to comfort your fellow Jew. You have a task: do not separate yourself from the community, rather, join us.

The second most important circle is Mishpachah – Family.

On Shabbat, we perform many important mitzvoth, but one of them is a favorite for many – lighting Shabbat candles. This mitzvah’s origins can be found in the Talmud and has lasted even in the most secular of homes. Even Jews who were forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition would do this mitzvah to retain some connection to their faith.

When we think of Shabbat candles, what do we see? My memories of lighting the Shabbat candles is my mother, my grandmothers, my sister, and now, Alissa and her family, setting up the candles, coming together and blessing them to a sweet tune. There is nothing that says peace more than being a part of this ritual. Afterward, my whole family kisses one another and says the words, “Shabbat Shalom”. Our tradition does not give us a meaning for every mitzvah, but for this mitzvah, the Talmud tells us that the reason for this mitzvah is Shalom Bayit – peace in the home.

The question I want to ask you is, where does keeping peace in your home rank in your life? Do you put it above work, or entertainment?

Our law code tells us that we are supposed to light them where we eat and it is most preferable to light the candles on the Shabbat table. Once these candles are lit, they cannot be moved. Perhaps this is our tradition telling us, you may run around all week, each family member eating on their own. Sometimes, you will eat in front of the television without talking, but for one day out of the week, there will be peace and you will experience it as a family.

And so our tradition obligates you to bring peace into your home at least once a week.

No one has ever said on their death bed, I wish I worked harder. Usually we say, I wish I spent more time with my family.

The Shabbat candles are a reminder, be with your family, be obligated to bringing peace into you home. Eat and sing together, at least once a week.

And besides lighting the candles once a week, I want you to do something else. During our youth service which was planned by one of our new congregants, Rabbi Amy Rader, we discussed the value of Shalom Bayit with our children.

Your children learned about the story of an ancient family that is much more modern than we think. Avraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael, as we learned through our Torah readings, went through periods of strife and turmoil, and yet, they all tried to bring peace to their family at certain moments.

So your children are bringing home a peace pie.

Over the next 10 Days, I want you to pay attention to the behavior in your household.

When your child does something that brings more Shalom Bayit (peacefulness) into your home, like using good manners, using kind and gentle words, sharing, taking turns, and other examples, write it down on the Peace Pie that should be placed where you see each other the most, and you will see how small actions can add up to big changes quickly.

אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי

If I am not for my family, who will be?

In the end, there will be no one else who will be for your family than you.

The final circle is the most important circle – you and God.

In the Amidah, we begin the prayer with the famous lines– Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitzhak, v’Elohei Yaakov. Why does the text repeat Elohei, God of, three times instead of just once? Because our Rabbis teach us that each of our forefathers had a different relationship with God. Just as they did, so must you.

You may ask, “Put me at the center? Isn’t that selfish?” Our society is often mocked as being too selfish. But if you look at our behavior, you would not make this argument. Parents work hard so their children will have the best education, the best products; so that they will be happy.

Spouses work to make their spouses happy, children work to make their parents happy.

I see parents who want the best for their child on their bar or bat mitzvah, or on their child’s wedding day. Ultimately, they want them to connect to God and the Jewish people.

But what about your relationship to God?

He (Hillel) used to say: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

During this year, work on your relationship with God by asking yourself some questions:

Why don’t you think or talk about God more than you do?

What are some of your doubts about God?

Do you think more about God when someone you love is in trouble or in danger?

Has God ever answered any of your prayers?

Do you thank God for the good things in your life as well as relating God to the bad things that happen?

And if you say you do not believe in God, perhaps it’s how you perceive God. So if you don’t believe in God, ask yourself, what is the God I don’t believe in? I assure you, the answer will lead you to a new place.

Obligation is not something that comes natural to us, but from our beginnings, God has told us how we must live. Today, on Rosh Hashanah, God said,

“לֹא טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ אֶעֱשֶׂה לּוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ“

“It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.”

Humanity was never supposed to be alone.

We live in a world where people tend to run away from commitment because they fear the worst. But ask yourself: is life really worth living without relationships with others?

We have to do something that seems so foreign and yet it is necessary: we have to obligate ourselves to each other, a culture of obligation, a culture of mitzvah.

This task was given to the first human, and is given to us on our birthday.

There are so many issues that we are told have to be the most important, and sometimes, we throw our hands up and wait for someone else to help.

When Kitty Genovese died, 38 people were bystanders. We’ll never know what would have happened if one person had acted.

Every year we have the option of being bystanders when we see things we don’t like in the world, in regards to Israel, our community, our families, and even ourselves; or we can bring peace to all these parts of our lives, one circle at a time; one righteous act at a time.

Start with that first circle, obligate yourself to God, then to your family, then to your community, then to Israel, and then the rest of the world.

Remember what Hillel taught us:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

Shanah Tovah U’Metukah, may we have a sweet and happy new year, may we all be blessed with both inner and outer peace in the coming year, may we realize the great potential we have to bring redemption to this world, and may we fulfill our destiny to be a light unto ourselves and the world. Amen.

Week of August 28 2010[1]

Join us before your Shabbat dinner for a short but lively service for your whole family!  This service is led by Rabbi Baum and includes our favorite Friday night songs and prayers as well stories and explanations.