Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

The Dalai Lama in Tibet, himself exiled, his people frightened and decimated by the Chinese regime, turns to a gathering of Rabbis and asks them, “Tell me your secret – the secret of Jewish spiritual survival for all these millennia… ”

We Jews are an anomaly in the eyes of the world. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and theologians are puzzled by our existential mystery.

They know ancient history. They read in biblical history references to the life of ancient peoples – Jebusites, Hittites, Girgashites, Perizeites, Cannanites, Babylonians and Roman – and all of them swallowed up in the dustbin of history, swallowed by oblivion.  

But you and I are here. “All things are mortal except the Jew ...“ So Mark Twain wrote in Harpers Magazine in 1898:

“ If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race ... properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of – but he is heard of, he has always been heard of. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, and he has done so with his hands tied behind him.”

What explains our Jewish perseverance, our viability, Jewish resilience?

“Resilience” is the right word to use. In Latin, it is derived from resilio – which means “to jump back.” In Hebrew, “resilience” is translated as kefitziooth – to jump back, to jump over, to jump through. What explains the bounce in our step after the holocausts that devastated the Temple in Jerusalem and the Jewish populace of the Land of Israel?  

How do you survive in madness of civilization?

We Jews are not strangers to crises, blood-soaked persecutions, pogroms, the first crematoria. In the sixth century before the Common Era – 586 B.C.E – Babylon destroyed Israel. Solomon’s Temple burned. God’s house foreclosed, God dispossessed, our people deracinated. They heard the taunting of their captors (Psalm 137) — “Sing for us a song of Zion.”

“How can we sing a song of Zion on alien soil?” Shame turned into rage against God. We were voiceless, songless.

Hear Psalm 44, our silence turned to rage against God: “Get up! Rouse Yourself, God… why do You sleep? God, why do You hide Your face? Why do You bite your tongue and become muted?

So … “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept.”

Then King Cyrus of Persia took Babylonia. In 537 BCE, the king issues an edict allowing us Jews to go back to the Promised Land.

Again. We build the Temple. Again. We restore the sacrifices again. Again, we are overwhelmed. This time, by the Roman Empire. Defeated, exiled, we are the laughing stock of the nations. “Since the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One has not laughed.” (T. Avodah Zarah 3b.) No more prohpet, priest, king, or sacrifice in the Temple.

Rome boasted of their technological achievement, their art, their bridges, aqueducts, sculpture, palaces and armies. And here I read in the Talmud, in Baba Bathra, a gripping story that reveals the Jewish struggle against cynicism and defeatism, ascetism.

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai – revolted by Roman contamination, corruption, infidelity, coarseness – takes his son and both flee to a cave, a sequestered place uncontaminated by Roman greed and acquisition. They live a life of piety, holiness, purity.

The rabbi and his son, for twelve years, studied and prayed and fasted and mourned alone in the cave. And then, on the twelfth year, when they heard that the Roman emperor had died, they left the cave to enter the world they had left.

But nothing had changed. The same Roman mendacity, the same cruelty. The Talmud reports that Rabbi Shimon and his son were so enraged at the world that “On whatever they cast their eyes was consumed by fire.” A heavenly echo addressed the two saintly figures:

“Have you come to destroy My world? Get back into the cave!”

Why is this story given such a prominent place in the Talmud? Because it teaches the profound Jewish response to isolationism and collective suicide.

“Go back to the cave” is a rebuke. A chastisement of Rabbi Shimon and his son. “You buried your life in a shroud of piety, but you made the cave a hideout from your engagement of the world. For twelve years you lived in a cave of moral irresponsibility.”

Jews do not curse the world. Jews do not blow out the Sabbath candle of hope and dwell in melancholy darkness. Jews do not live this world with contemptus mundi – “a contempt of the world.”

God declares: “This is My world. This is your world. This is our world. Live with it! With all its flaws and pains and floods and earthquakes and cruelties. This world was created with both lion and lamb, serpent and dove, sun and darkness.” But don’t spill out the wine. Raise the cup of wine and sanctify the imperfect world. Sing the Kiddush.

Don’t’ burn the challah in anger. Remove the cloth covering the challah and recite the motzi. Don’t promise the hungry “pie in the sky by and by...”. Give the hungry bread from the earth “here, now, and nigh.”  

This Talmudic story, from the second century of the Common Era, calls to mind the dialogue in the 19^th century novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan Karamozov, in Dostoyevsky’s novel, is a skeptic. A cynical figure. He confesses to his brother, Alyosha: “Brother, it’s not God that I do not accept. It is God’s world that I cannot accept.”

In Judaism, you may not rip God away from the world. You cannot praise God and curse humanity. You cannot recite “Father in Heaven” and ignore His children on earth.

In Judaism, to love God is to love this world. To love God – melach ha olam – is to care about this world. To love God is to love life, the blessing of laughter, the ecstasy of dancing. The creation is clearly not perfect. Then mend fractured souls, straighten the bent, protect the vulnerable, embrace the frightened in this world, give melody to the songless.

In this world. Here and now.

Listen to the unique rabbinic declaration about this world – you will not hear it in any other religion, Eastern or Western: neither Hinduism, Buddism, Christianity, Islam.

“One hour – one hour in repentance and in loving kindness in this world is better than the whole world that is to come.” The Jewish focus is not on the hereafter; the focus is on the “here-now.”   This world, Olam hazeh and that world – olam ha ba ah … linked and bonded.

It’s easier to believe in the “other” world than to “behave” faithfully in this world.

Rabbi Hanoch, the Hasidic sage, is asked by his disciple, “But don’t we believe in two worlds, this one and the other world? And do not the nations of the world also believe in two worlds, this world below and the other world above? Then what difference is there between us?”

Rabbi Hanoch answered, “There is a difference. They believe that the two worlds are separate, severed – one above and one below. But we believe that the two worlds are one. And we have to mold the two worlds into one. This is the dream we sing of at the end of the service, the Aleinu, from the Prophet Zecharia:  

“On that day, the Lord shall be one, and His name one.” That is the “arc” of Jewish monotheism —the oneness of Divinity, humanity, and this world: God, Nature and human nature.

“Rabbi, I had a strange dream. I was taken to heaven, and there I looked for the Tzadikkim – for the righteous people. And I could not find any in heaven. No tzadik in Heaven. How is that possible?”

“My son, you are looking in the wrong place. The righteous are not in Heaven is in the righteous.” What does he mean?

This is the darling “this-worldliness” that surfaces in Judaism – there is no “ancestor worship” – “The dead shall not praise You, God. Nor all who go down in silence. But we shall praise You.”

The Psalm has filtered down into our rites of mourning. Why is the fringe of the tallit, placed upon the back of the deceased, torn? To teach us that the deceased have no mitzvoth, no duties to perform. We honor the memory of our deceased, but here is no ancestor worship. We don’t expect those in the other world to do our work in this world. Their tallit is torn, but ours is whole. We have mitzvoth to perform in this world. So the Psalmist in the Hallel exults: “I shall not die but live, and declare the glory of God.”

In my father’s home I heard this Yiddish folklore: Tachrachim haben nischt kine keshenes – “shrouds have no pockets.” But we have pockets in which to dig our hands and give to those who have no pockets and no coins.

I do not suggest that there was no belief in the afterlife, but that the other-world in Judaism is subsidiary — in the background. It is noteworthy that the world to come is not even mentioned in the five books of the Torah; not in the Siddur, not in the Ten Commandments, not in Genesis. No heaven and hell mentioned in the Mourner’s Kaddish. In the Mishnah, there is not even mention of the afterlife.

The Talmud informs us, in Baba Bathra 60b, that after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, at first many Jews became dispirited ascetics. They denied themselves laughter, song, dance. They ate no meat. They drank no wine. When Rabbi Joshua asked them “why the self denial, why the self-mortification, why the abstemious living?” they answered, “Rabbi, how can we eat meat when the altar is destroyed, and the sacrifice of animals can no longer be performed? How can we drink wine when wine libation poured out on the altar can no longer be performed?”

Then Rabbi Joshua retorted, “But if so, you cannot eat fruit, or bread, or drink water either. For all these were used as sacrifices on the altar. And it is no more.”

Rabbi Joshua continued, “My children, Rome has decreed that we cannot circumcise our sons. Will you not marry? Not have children? Not build homes?”

Rabbi Joshua concluded with this Jewish wisdom for survival: “Not to mourn is impossible, for the blow has already fallen. But to live with mourning alone is impossible. To mourn overmuch is to betray our loyalty to God, whose name is ‘Chay ha-olamim’ – the life of the world.

Live with balance. Understand the pendulum of life. Love life, but understand death. Love health and understand illness. Mourn with measure.”

Again, that ancient Jewish wisdom enters yours and my personal ritual of mourning which rabbis ordained. I marvel at its Jewish wisdom: Shivah – seven days, but not more. Shloshim – 30 days of mourning, but not more. Kaddish – eleven months, but not more. Yizkor, yahrzeit, candles – yes. But mourning is not forever. In a Jewish fold custom enacted at the end of Shivah, friends come to the house of the mourner, embrace the bereaved, lift him or her to her feet, bring them out of the cave of mourning into the life of the streets and marketplace.

As one rabbi taught, “For to mourn over-much is to mourn not for the deceased, but for something else you mourn, perhaps yourself.” For whom do you mourn? For what do you mourn? To know for whom you mourn opens the door to wisdom, consolation, comfort and survival.

“But Rabbi, if to love God is to love this world, what shall we do with unlovable parts of this world? How can we appeal to God to help overcome evil now that God has been exiled? How can we atone without the Temple, without the priest or Levite? Without the sacrificial lamb or goat or sheep? The smoke of the sacrifice no longer rises to the heavens. The smoke lays heavy on earth.”

Then the great sage, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, rose and said to them, “Be not grieved. We have another atonement just as effective as the Temple. Did not the Prophet Hosea declare, in the name of God,         “For I desire goodness, not sacrifice.”

          Here a Jewish revolutionary paradigm shift in Jewish life takes place. We survived because we had the courage and wisdom and self-esteem to adapt, to change, to evolve, to refine, to invent, to imitate. Contrary to fundamentalism, ours in a “tradition of change.” The Jewish genius of adaptation is the genius of Jewish creative evolution.

After the Holocaust, rabbis turned the Judaic camera from the vertical to the horizontal focus. The new arena is not in Heaven but here on earth. Israel creates a new way of seeing the world, a new response to a new situation, a new interpretation of history.

A poignant legend in the Kaballah of the Zohar: After the destruction, the priests threw the keys to the Temple into the heavens: “You God, take back the keys! You guard Your home. We give up! It’s in Your hands.” That is the moment of defeat. “Leave it to God” is not faith. “Leave it to God” is a selfish form of atheism that declares “Don’t count on me.”

“But Rabbi, what else can do we do when God is exiled and the Temple destroyed?”

Imitate, innovate, emulate God. Bring God down from the Heavens into this world; from Heaven to earth. For according to Judaic faith, we have been given the capacity to sanctify, to heal, to love, to give life to this world. Who can imitate? Only someone who share something with the imitated. “Imitatio Dei” – Jewish mystics called this devekuth – “cleaving.”

How can we imitate God? As written in the Talmud Sotah (14a),

 

“As God clothed the naked of Adam and Eve, you clothe the naked.”

“As God visited Abraham when he was ill, you visit the sick.”

“As God comforted Isaac when his father died, you comfort the bereaved.”

“As God buried Moses, you bury the deceased.”

What audacity! “Who am I to imitate God?”

You can imitate God because you were born with divine potentiality, not the indelible stigma of sin.

“God who has sanctified us, we have been sanctified.”

What Godliness can we imitate of God’s action attributes?   Hear Psalm 146:7-9 — the attributes, the actions of God – the verbs of God – can be lived. God is the ideal model whom we can emulate.   Listen to the pulsating rhythm of the Psalmist:

The God that we are to imitate…

“… upholds the cause of the oppressed…

Gives bread to the hungry…

Sets prisoners free…

Gives sight to the blind…

Lifts up those who are bowed down…

Loves the righteous…

Watches over the stranger…

Sustains the fatherless and the widow…

Frustrates the way of the wicked.”

So we bring God down from heaven to earth, from philosophic abstraction to existential human relations. These are the action verbs of God that we can emulate. Here is the bridge between the sacred and secular, between God and humanity.

In Judaism, unlike so many traditions, we do not demonize the secular, split this world into the secular from the religious. The secular in Yiddish is veltlichkeit – “worldliness.” Worldly wisdom, worldly science, worldly law, worldly Judaism.

What is this talk that vilifies the secular? Other religions may speak that way, but not ours.

Listen to this exchange in the Talmud (Shabbas 82a): Rabbah does not attend the lectures of Rav Hisda.

“Why not?” his father asks him.

“Because he speaks of mundane, secular matters about the natural functions of digestive organs and how one should behave in regard to them. I am interested in matters divine, spiritual.”

“My son, Rabbi Hisda occupies himself with the life of God’s creatures… with the secular and the mundane. All the more reason to listen to him. Go!”

I went to Yeshiva College, and never heard a disparaging word about secularism. The curriculum of Yeshiva University was open to Mishnah and Medicine, to Talmud and technology. And all my teachers of the Bible, Talmud, Mishnah, all attended secular universities. The Yeshiva did not excommunicate the university.

J.B. Soloveitchik, the Rav, was immersed in Talmud, but received his doctorate from a secular university, the University of Berlin.

So too Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who, steeped in Hasidism, attended the secular University of Berlin.

So too Chabad’s Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who attended the secular Sorbonne.

So too Rabbi Isaac Breuer, the grandson of Orthodox theologian Samson Raphael Hirsch, urged Jews to study Immanuel Kant, a secular Christian philosopher: “Whoever studies Kant’s Critique of Pure Religion, should recite ‘Amen.’”

The Talmudic rabbis authored a benediction blessing secular scholars, Jews or Gentile: “Blessed art Thou, oh Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has imparted from His wisdom to flesh and blood.”

Jewish “this worldliness” opened wide the horizons of knowledge, all knowledge, including secular wisdom. You think it’s an accident that Jews send our sons and daughters to college more than any other ethnic group? Close to 90 percent of our children are in college, and we represent ten percent of college faculty. Is it an accident that we have produced so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners in science, in technology, in literature?

And it is Jewish “this-worldliness” that emphasizes social action; Judaism is not concerned with saving souls for heaven, but with saving lives on earth. In Judaism, abortion is not murder. Evolution is not blasphemy, stem-cell research is not apostasy. Salvation is not secured by dogma but by moral wisdom. The history of Judaism is that secular science and sacred values are allies.

No Rapture lifts you out of this world into an ethereal cave and plunges others to the burning pit of the earth, or portrays Judaism as exlusively true.

Consider the majesty of birthing of Zionism. Secular Jews built the land of Israel. Secular Jews rejected a religion of “waiting for the Messiah to come,” waiting for the supernatural to intervene. Zionists did not wait for the world to come, but worked in the world’s becoming.

It is no accident that so many Jews throughout our history organized and joined causes that lifted the faces of the poor, warmed the frozen bodies of the stranger, sheltered the immigrant, protected the vulnerable.   Sociologists are puzzled by Jewish behavior. They wonder how is it so many Jews who economically live like Presbyterians vote like Puerto Ricans? Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests?

Two weeks before Rosh Hashana, tradition has us read the verses that shape this worldliness of our faith. Where is the wisdom of faith found? And who can find it for us?

Deuteronomy 30 declares “The Mitzvah – the instruction – is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond your reach that you shall say, ‘Who among us can go up to Heaven and get it for us’; neither is it beyond the sea that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea so that you can get it’ ? The instruction is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it.”

It is not in Heaven, nor in the magic of astrology, nor in the dogma ordained by someone deemed infallible. The instruction is not super-rational, nor supernatural; it is in you, in us, in this world.

Listen to the words of the greatest Talmudist of the past century, J.B. Soloveitchik: “The human being must rely on himself. No one can help him. He is his own redeemer. He is his own messiah who has come to redeem himself from the darkness.”

We hear the purpose and meaning of survival in the “cri de couer” of Saul Bellows’ characters: “Use me. For God’s sake, make use of me.”  

There is no greater blessing that we can wish for ourselves and for our peoples’ survival in this world, where the sacred and the secular embrace.