Divre Harav – Words from the Rabbi

Divre Harav – April, 2025

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We’ll sit around the table in Mid-April and tell the story of Israel’s oppression in Egypt and subsequent redemption by God. And we’ll talk about a series of 10 punishments God sent on the entire Egyptian people until their leader finally let us go, despoiling the Egyptian on the way out of town, and trapping their army in the sea to drown.

Is this revenge or is it justice?

The Torah (and associated Midrash) portray the plagues as carefully measured punishments against that which the Egyptians worshipped as gods; the money taken from the Egyptians as reparations for many years of slavery, and drowning the army as a measure for measure justice for drowning Israeli baby boys.

Sitting around the table, it’s hard to imagine the Egyptians as innocent victims of Pharaoh. They are the overseers, the enablers of the oppressive, vicious, enslavement of the people who once saved them from famine. The Haggadah contains a passage in which several rabbis almost gleefully imagine multiplying the ten plagues – there were not just ten, there were 10 plus 50 more on the way out! No there were a total of 240! No, there were 300 plagues! The suffering is multiplied over and over, as if the plain sense of the Biblical story isn’t enough to achieve justice.

In the 2009 film “Inglorious Basterds,” director Quentin Tarantino gives us a Shoah revenge fantasy, in which a young Jewish refugee witnesses the slaughter of her family by the Nazis, and arranges a gathering of prominent Nazi officers for a movie premier at the theater she operates, coordinated with a ruthless band of Jewish guerrilla soldiers planning to blow up the theater.

Both the seder and the film play with the Jewish trope of being powerless against evil. We are not in fact powerless. In the seder, God is on our side, fighting for us. In the film, we’ve learned to take up arms and fight back. But the line between justice and revenge is blurry. We don’t defeat the enemy by hurting them exactly as much as they hurt us. We need to burn them to the ground, drown them, blow them up, punish them so thoroughly that they only have enough strength to lay down their whips and chains, shower us with gold and silver, and and wish us well on our way out of town. And the brave among them follow behind us because they see our way of life and the power of our God as far superior to Egyptian gods and civilization.

In the Bible, the stories attribute Israeli victories to God. Revenge and justice both belong to God, and human armies are God agents. Real life, however, and the fantasy of film. is messy. We don’t have a voice of God telling us exactly what to do. Instead, we have a collection of pundits and military analysts and politicians and soldiers acting, we hope, with integrity and sense of justice, not revenge. And when they mess us, sooner or later there will be a commission of inquiry to tell us how they erred and what we can do in the future to prevent such disasters.

And we pray: Next year in Jerusalem of God, Jerusalem of Peace!

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • zedak – justice
  • nekama – revenge

Divre Harav – March, 2025

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As I write this article, my heart is heavy, awaiting the release of the rest of the hostages from phase one of the Gaza cease fire agreement. There are 15 more presumably living hostages and the bodies of eight hostages who are no longer alive yet to be returned. There is no indication of how many of the remaining 65, whose return will, God willing, be part of a phase two agreement, are still alive.

At the same time, I rejoice with relief at the images and video of the hostages who have been returned and reunited with their families. In particular, I am grateful that Gadi Moses, the hostage whose picture has occupied a chair on the Bima during our services and a chair in the meeting room during Kiddush and meetings, has been released.

According to interviews following his release, while held hostage by Hamas for more than 15 months in Gaza, 80-year-old Gadi Moses ate mainly a piece of bread and an olive twice a day. He lost 15 kilograms, about 33 pounds during his captivity. During that time, he was given a small bowl of water to wash himself every five days and had to ask to use the toilet. He moved frequently and was mostly alone, typically held in a room about 2 meters square (slightly more than 6 feet square). He calculated math problems in his head to distract himself, and walked up to 11 km (six miles) a day, measuring the distance by walking the perimeter of his room.

Gadi Moses helped build Kibbutz Nir Oz with his bare hands. A passionate agronomist and farmer, he used the knowledge he found studying the ground and how to make things grow to help foreign countries grow crops. Gadi adored explaining the fine details of agriculture to people coming to the Israeli kibbutz for instruction. In his retirement, he built a communal garden there. A lover of fine wines, he grew grapes as a hobby. He loved nothing more than nature and his family, his three children and his grandchildren.

I have reached out to Gadi to offer my gratitude that he is back home and to invite him, if and when he is able to travel, to visit us in Grand Rapids, sit in the chair we had designated for him, and speak to us about his experience and his plans to rebuild his beloved Kibbutz community.

As we celebrate Purim this month and Pesah next month, let us remember that the evil represented by Haman and Pharaoh are not just stories; they are a real part of the world in which we live and a real threat to our continuing ability to publicly live out of Judaism in the world today. Gathering to hear the Megillah and to celebrate a Seder is our way of saying, “No matter how hard you try to prevent us from embracing our Torah and living our Jewish lives, we will persevere!”

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • ne’edar – missing
  • nishbah – taken captive
  • ḥatufim – hostages
  • m’shuḥrar – freed

Divre Harav – February, 2025

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The changing religious shape of Jerusalem and Israel

I had dinner with some friends in Israel who made aliyah last year. They are a typical religious family living in South Jerusalem in the neighborhood of Arnona-Talpiyot, not too far from the future site of the American Embassy. Their children, two of whom I met at dinner, had preceded them in moving to Israel. I spoke to the two daughters about their post high school service to the country. As a matter of law, young women are obligated to do military service. However, religious women are automatically exempted from any service. One daughter accepted the exemption from the army and did alternative national service. She explained there wasn’t even a question in her mind of whether to volunteer for national service. Israelis serve their country after high school and that’s why she didn’t take full advantage of the exemption. The other daughter, who served in the army, explained that she didn’t qualify for the exemption because she wasn’t religious. I was impressed by her honesty. She lives with her parents in a religious household, so she basically conforms to religious norms. She could have signed a statement to this effect and accepted a full exemption. But she felt the strong pull of a young Israeli to do regular army service.

From what I observed and from what other friends told me, this is typical of the fluid religious atmosphere of South Jerusalem and other parts of Israel where religious and secular live side by side. The lines between religious and non-religious are not as clear as they once were. Religious families need not be ultra-nationalists living deep in Judea and Samaria in order to feel a sense of patriotic duty to the state. The non-Orthodox gather in small groups for Shabbat and to celebrate holidays. The Conservative/Masorti movement is growing slowly, but the number of informal, grass-roots, egalitarian, minyanim is exploding. People want community and if the official state rabbinate is not going to provide a type that fits their needs, a Jewishly well-educated, Hebrew-literate, public need only gather ten or more like-minded people in a public or inexpensively rented space and create it themselves. Best of all, it is fueled largely by native Israelis as much as North American immigrants.

A generation ago, common wisdom suggested that every Israel was Orthodox, even if they were completely non-observant. Today, they may not be familiar with the non-Orthodox movements, but they understand what it means to be shiv’yoni, egalitarian. The founding generation of Israel was militantly secular, and society clearly divided Ashkanazi and Mizrahi from one another. Today’s generation has thoroughly mixed Jews of European, Asian, and North African descent (central African Jews are still working towards full inclusion), and the secular population has an appreciation of Judaism from a secular school system infused with Jewish texts and traditions. There are still neighborhood and isolated areas populated by a kind of 18th and 19th century Judaism, but for the most part, socially and religiously, Israel has leapt gracefully from the 19th to the 21st century.

In a visit overshadowed by the dark cloud of war and the gloom of hostages held in Gaza, the energy of Jerusalem’s religious life was a beam of sunshine.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • Tz’va Haganah L’Yisrael (typically abreviated as Tzahal) – Israel Defense Force
  • Sherut Le’umi – national service
  • Masorti – “traditional.” The name of the Conservative movement of Judaism in Israel and worldwide.
  • Shiv’yoni – “egalitarian”

Divre Harav – January, 2025

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Question: How many day of Hanukkah will there be in 2025? 
Answer: Ten!

This is a companion riddle to the question, How many days of Hanukkah were there in 2024?
Answer: Six!

Of course, neither the length of Hanukkah nor the size of the Hanukkah menorah change from year to year. The years that Hanukkah crosses the secular new year are just a reminder that we live our lives as Jews with one foot in the civil calendar and one foot in the Jewish lunar-solar calendar. But Jews had been living dual lives for over 500 years before the creation of the calendar based on the Christian counting of years. During the Babylonian exile, some Biblical months known simply by number adopted the contemporary Assyrian/Babylonian names (the fourth month became Tammuz, the fifth month became Av). Other Biblical month names were dropped in favor of the contemporary names (Nisan replaced the Biblical Aviv, Iyar replaced the Biblical Ziv, Tishre replaced the Biblical Eitanim, Marheshvan replaced the Biblical Bul).

The privilege of setting the calendar belongs to the dominant culture. They determine days of rest and holidays. The minority cultures within tend to adopt their calendar because it is necessary to share a common frame reference to time with our neighbors. But we also retain our own calendar to remind ourselves that we march to the beat of a different drummer.

We celebrate Tuesday, December 31 and Wednesday, January 1 as ‘Rosh Hodesh,’ the beginning of the month of Tevet, with songs of Hallel in our morning prayers. Why two days? Because a lunar month is 29.5 days. When a Jewish month is 30 days long, the new moon actually begins near the end of the last day of the previous month, so both that day and the first day of the next month are celebrated.

This month, our calendar directs us to commemorate the beginning of the Babylonian siege against Jerusalem in 589 BCE on the 10th of Tevet (Friday, January 10). The month of Tevet in Akkadian/Babylonian means ‘muddy.’ Tevet falls in the middle of the rainy season. This makes sense – in Israel, Tevet is the rainiest month.

Next month, we remember the 15th of Shevat as the day that trees become one year older (Thursday, February 13). The name of the month comes from an Akkadian word meaning “strike,” also referring to heavy rains striking the land during the winter season.

Each year, we remember the death of loved ones on the anniversary of their death on the Hebrew calendar. To do so is to recall their death and observe Jewish rituals of memory in the context of our calendar, our counting of the months and days.  I encourage you to observe the Yahrtzeit by saying Kaddish on the Shabbat prior to their Yahrtzeit. And if you are able to help gather a minyan on the day of the Yahrtzeit itself, our custom is to say Kaddish on that day as well.

Yes, we are westernized Americans and we live according to the civil calendar. But in order not to forget our indigenous Jewish roots in the Tanakh and in the land of Israel, we should also live our lives according to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • Kislev, Tevet, Sh’vat – the winter months
  • Adar, Nisan, Iyar – the spring months
  • Sivan, Tammuz, Av – the summer months
  • Elul, Tishre, Marheshvan – the fall months

Divre Harav – November, 2024

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Cultivating gratitude begins with the reflex ‘thank-you’ that parents teach children. We teach children to say thank you when someone gives them a gift or does something nice for them. We tell them to say thank you. We might even force them to say thank you by threatening to take back the gift. We know that very young children say thank you only because they have to and not because they feel a sense of gratitude. Nonetheless, it is an important first step in building a practice of gratitude. The Jewish source for this comes from the Talmud [Sanhedrin 105b], regarding Torah study or doing mitzvot, mitokh shelo lishma, ba lishma, “from doing something not for its own sake, one will come to do it for its own sake.”

Ultimately, though, we want to cultivate a real, deep sense of gratitude. We’d like for the practice of saying thank you to be an expression of the gratefulness we feel in our souls, not just a barely remembered reflex. This begins with an attitude of how we do things for others. Take a lesson from Pirke Avot [1:3]:

“Do not be like servants who serve the master in the expectation of receiving a reward. Rather, be like servants who serve the master without the expectation of receiving a reward.”

When we volunteer, help others, serve others, or do acts of kindness simply because we want to help, or because it is the right thing to do, or even out of a sense of obligation or commandedness, we cultivate a habit of not expecting the reward of a ‘thank you.’ Any gratitude we get back is an unexpected bonus, a delight to be appreciated and savored. This leads us towards a deeper sense of appreciation for the kindnesses others do for us with no expectation of reward. Because we know how it feels to get an unexpected thank you, we are more likely to feel a deep sense of gratitude, and the thank you that we offer will flow from depths of our soul.

In short, the path to becoming a more grateful person begins with doing quiet acts of kindness for others. Anonymous gifts of tzedakah, bringing a meal to someone experiencing some kind of difficult situation, volunteering to help with a synagogue program or support a minyan, or sit with a friend in a time of need.

Some people, at their Thanksgiving table, have a practice of going around the table and sharing something that they are thankful for. Maybe this year, try instead to share a moment when you received an unexpected gift of gratitude, and a moment when you gave someone the gift of an unexpected thank you.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • • Modeh Ani L’fanekha – A piece of the morning liturgy, “I am grateful to you …”
  • • Todah – thank you