Before Shabbat

With all the madness in the world, Halloween was a welcome diversion. Looking at the cute costumes is always fun. Marveling at the increasingly elaborate, macabre yard decorations is hysterical. Some are pretty scary, including the spooky tombstones and skeletons rising from the dead. Add the multicolored lights and some occasional screams and groans from hidden speakers (“Alexa. Play scary sounds!”), and you’ve got lots of ghostly amusement.

My street, just off Washington St in Newton Corner and a block away from an eastbound Mass Pike entrance ramp, has become, over the years, a true Halloween magnet. Hundreds of kids – and I mean, HUNDREDS, parade up and down the avenue. I estimate that I saw about 500 kids, which is down a bit from last year, very likely because of the chilly weather.

As I poured my candy into a large soup kettle, I anticipated the particular joy I experience passing out the sweets. I particularly love the nervous and slightly overwhelmed little ones, their parents coaching them on what to say. Then there’s the roving packs, usually slightly older kids, trick or treating without their parents. They can be wise guys, insolent, and sarcastic. I sass them back, and they love it. I was ready for the evening rush.

I looked at our walkway. Our “We Stand With Israel” placard was boldly planted right there. I paused for a moment and began to wonder. What does this sign mean to me? Why did I put it in our yard? The answer is apparent to me: now, more than ever, I need to publicly proclaim my love of Israel and the people who live there. I need to publicly reaffirm my connection to Israel, a connection that has been ineluctably tied to my soul since I was twelve.

I realized that the kids and their parents would all walk right past my sign on their way to my front door. This made me pause for a moment. A catalog of “what ifs” began to form in my mind. What if kids pull it down? What if some anti-Israel people rip it down and get nasty? What if one of those wiseguy gangs starts to dare each other to do or say something offensive? I mean, it could happen… So… should I move it just for Halloween night?

I stopped in mid-thought. And I got angry – with myself. There is no way in the world I will move that sign. I will not be afraid. I will not hide. I will not knuckle under to anyone who wants to scare me or my people. I refuse to give antisemites what they want: my pride, my faith, my history, my autonomy. My father escaped the Holocaust – just barely. The rest of his family died – in Berlin or at Auschwitz. Our continued existence in the world is something Jews NEVER take for granted. We are thankful for our freedom and our continued survival. And we won’t give it away. Hamas reminded us that right now, there are people bent on destroying us who will commit the most heinous, despicable acts of violence against us. And if that weren’t enough, some people have rallied in the streets of America to show support for Hamas. So hell no, I did not move the sign. I won’t hide.

I know some college kids are scared right now. Some Jewish kids are asking university registrars to change their names on class lists lest they are outed as Jews. They don’t want to be singled out by twisted professors or ignorant fellow students. I get it. I get their fear. Shame on the college administrations that have allowed Jewish children whose parents are paying a lot of money for their education to feel so marginalized, so threatened, that these students deny their Jewishness. This is what they call in Yiddish a Shanda, a dreadful, shameful act. I hope these Jewish students soon realize they are not alone and do not have to put their heads down and deny a legacy of wisdom and joy. Yes, the Israel-Hamas war begs a lot of questions, but it doesn’t change the fundamental truth of our tradition – it can’t.

Nothing happened on Halloween: no wise guy antisemitism, no epithets or insults. One of the kids in a middle school gang walked up to the porch and said, “Happy Halloween!” and then “Happy Birthday!” because, well, because he was a wise guy. Then he turned, saw the sign, and said, “Whoa. My mom will love this.” He took out his phone and took a picture. Then this kid, with an axe planted in the side of his head, turned to me and said, “Thank you.”

No trick. Just a treat.

No sooner did I submit last week’s Before Shabbat when I started worrying: what will I say next week? I assumed that nothing much would change, that, in fact, it would only get worse. I was right. No panacea presented itself. No Ghandi-esque figure arose in Gaza City or in Tel Aviv. And so, the beat goes on.

I am deeply troubled by so many things. With every passing day, my list of things to bemoan and decry grows larger. The latest issue that has me riled up, angry, and occasionally worried is the human remoras.

Remoras are those eely fish that adhere to sharks and dine on the scraps of their host’s meals. The human ones I’m talking about are adhering to the Israel-Gaza War. They’re having a field day, going along for the ride, picking up some juicy morsels. They take the scraps of suffering, hate, antisemitism, and Islamophobia and then feast on them. They post their menus online, on placards, and on poster board. They tear down pictures of hostages. They dox people with whom they disagree. They harass and belittle others, trying to understand the situation, but who may come at it from a different position.

The remoras are on the Left, charging Israel with genocide, blaming Israel for the savagery of Hamas, marching on college campuses chanting hateful slogans, and either 1) don’t understand that “Palestine free from the river to the sea!” is another way of saying “Death to the Jews!”, or, 2) DO understand and now have the chance to express raw antisemitism and Jew hatred and get away with it.

The remoras on the Right say that all progressive values are now proven to be false promises and that the world needs more authoritarian strongmen to beat the perceived enemy. Some suggest there are no innocent Gazan children and that everyone is culpable in a war for survival, which, ironically, is what Hamas says about the Jews.

The remoras that most upset me are Jewish people who march in demonstrations, waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans. They feel very self-righteous and politically correct. They’ll show the world just how progressive they are, marching against the interests of Israel. They are surrounded by people with whom they’ve worked on many other significant causes: from George Floyd to BLM to LGBTQ+ rights to fixing the criminal justice system. The Jewish remoras fail to understand that they are surrounded by people who are, frankly, antisemitic or, at the very least, indifferent to Jewish history and our painful past, filled with violence, discrimination, and abandonment.

There’s not much we can do about the shameful folly on college campuses. We can’t police social media. Haters are going to hate. Remoras are going to feed. But we don’t have to join in. We can be resolute. We can keep up with the news. We will continue to wrestle with unspeakable tragedy and the costs of war.

If ever there was a time for caution and care with words, it’s now. If ever there were a time for Jews to support the Jewish people by supporting the people of Israel, it’s now. We can’t succumb to our own individual self-interests. Instead, we must keep an open heart and a sense of balance and self-respect.

Someday soon, I will joyfully write about the last irises blooming in my yard. There’s a lot to say about how Halloween is getting bigger and bigger and crazier and why. The best Genesis Torah portions are over the next several weeks. But that’s not for now. Alas, we are at war.

Shabbat Shalom,

rebhayim

I’ve been reading article after article, listening to multiple NPR broadcasts and podcasts, watching the news, and searching for a thread, a cogent narrative. I want to answer the question, What’s going to happen next? I want to know what to expect. But, as Amos, the 8^th century BCE prophet, famously said, “I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet.” [Amos 7:14] I get what he meant.

There’s so much flying at us, like a plague of locusts. I want to find redemption in the facts and the fury. But all I can see is sadness and grief. And more anger.

And so I worry—all the time. I worry so much about my friends in Israel, their children, and their grandchildren. Everything is upside down. Right now, many stores are closed because of security concerns as well as a shortage of workers. After all, over 300,000 Israelis have been called up to active duty. All kinds of jobs are currently vacated. Schools are closed. People are volunteering to assume positions that must be filled. For those of us who have been to Israel before, none of what’s happening computes. It’s so surreal and so scary.

Survivors of the kibbutz massacres, whole kibbutz communities, are holed up in hotels in Eilat and at the Dead Sea. They hang out and cry together. They try not to consider the past but press the Israeli government to get the hostages home.

I’m not sure they talk much about the future. For the folks whose homes were destroyed, looted, and burned to the ground, where the floors are stained with blood and the walls riddled with bullet holes, they must wonder if they have the fortitude to return. Can they ever feel safe again? Or will they knock down the existing properties, burned out or not, and build all new homes and structures?

These are impossible questions to answer right now. And it’s all filtered through the central lens of the war. Who moves next? When does the ground offensive begin? Will Hezbollah out of Lebanon get more involved? Will the West Bank go unhinged? As Thomas Friedman wrote in today’s New York Times, If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after.

It feels dangerous to hope. What, if anything, can keep hope alive in this moment? The smoke has not cleared from the battlefield. The tears are still flowing. Israeli children have been brutally murdered and taken hostage. Gazan children have been crushed by rubble and killed by shrapnel. In the haze of grief and anger, all we can do is hang on and wait. I am not a prophet. I’m not gifted with a crystal ball. All I have is a breaking heart and a prayer for every parent who has lost a child. I wish I had more to give.

I’ve been walking around in a fog. I feel a numbness of the senses. I am moving slowly, tentative, unsure where exactly I am in space. Nothing is in sharp focus. It’s all feeding through a diffraction. Light is bending towards the darkness.

אֶשָּׂ֣א עֵ֭ינַי אֶל־הֶהָרִ֑ים מֵ֝אַ֗יִן יָ֘בֹ֥א עֶזְרִֽי

“I lift my eyes to the mountains. Where will my help come from?”

I watch the news, switching between CNN and MSNBC when I get bored or when a particular speaker makes me angry. Images appear, often the same ones, over and over again. Blurred bodies. Hostages being dragged away. Two trucks filled with murderous Hamas terrorists who dismount and then look for innocent people to kill. Extraordinary stories of Israelis who survived. Heartbreaking stories of slaughtered babies.

And yes, I look at the rubble of Gaza, piles of stone and twisted steel. I see the anguish of mothers and the abject fear of children. I see the weariness of rescue workers moving pieces of concrete in search of survivors. None of those images diminish my resolve to support Israel. This Palestinian misery is created with the calculated slaughter of Israelis by Hamas, the ruling power of Gaza. Hamas can construct elaborate tunnels and underground structures beneath Gaza, but who will not build a single bomb shelter for their people. Because they want to parade the suffering of their people as a kind of twisted banner of righteousness and liberation. It is the long game of war that the innocent will suffer. It has always been thus. And my heart aches for these innocent Gazan children.

At a certain point, I want to – I long to – turn it off. But I can’t. I am a grieving bug stuck in the amber of a million tears. In some ways, this reminds me of how I felt on 9/11, and 9/12, and… Reading everything, watching it over and over, discussing it ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

After 9/11, I knew people who were directly touched and devastated by the actions of cruel terrorists. People who lost loved ones in a breathtaking act of violence perpetrated by nihilists with no regard for life.

After 9/11, I felt destabilized. I wondered what would happen and what the world would look like. I walked around a bit like a zombie, my arms outstretched, looking for balance, looking for life.

On those beautiful September days, I wondered if anything would be the same. Could I snap out of it? Would I be comfortable laughing and playing with the kids? Enjoy a meal? Listen to jazz? Or was I sentenced to a permanent shivah period?

The thing is, as Jeff Goldblum once famously said, life finds a way. Babies are borne. There’s B’nai mitzvah and weddings and brises. There is love. There is family. There is light. There is shabbat.

I don’t think that’s naïve. I think it’s simply the truth about our existence. Dwelling only in the darkness causes blindness. Dwelling only in the light also causes blindness. So, we must find our way:

וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹ אֶחָֽד

There is darkness, there is light, a first day, a new day.

Like sherpas, we carry the provisions as we search for the next safe plateau. Eventually, the fog thins, and we can see again. The vista does not look the same, and we will often think of that Shabbat morning, looking at the headlines, not believing how vulnerable Israel is and, by extension, just how vulnerable we are.

So, we gather and remember. We gather to embrace each other, assuring ourselves that we are not alone, that we are a proud, connected community, a temple with a history of banding together. We don’t need to walk like zombies when we are together. We give each other the gift of empathy, strength, and courage.

The war will be long, and there will be moments of deep darkness and pain. We are in this for the long haul, committed to our Israeli brothers and sisters. And we are committed to each other.

I love the poetry of John Roedel. It is unadorned and straightforward. There are no mysterious segues or ambiguous metaphors. One doesn’t have to read it repeatedly in hopes of “getting” it. His work expresses the rawness of loss, fear, and disappointment. He knows what it means to feel utterly lost and alone. Some of you, including my entire family, would say, “Of course you like it. It goes deep, and it goes dark.” And all of you would be right. I do not perceive the light right away. I always notice the darkness first.

When I was a little kid, I feared the dark. I always wanted the hall light on and kept my bedroom door wide open. Some adults – I blame my father, but what else is new? – would invariably switch it off after I fell asleep. They didn’t consider that I often woke up in the middle of the night. I would panic every time. I would get so angry that they left me in the dark. But I was too afraid to complain about it, fearing some very unpleasant retaliation.

I made a decision. I couldn’t do anything about the hall light getting turned off, and I couldn’t risk getting caught with a flashlight on at 2 a.m. So, I decided to embrace the darkness. It hid me away from my parents. It gave me solace even as it once threatened me. My big move, the moment I knew that the darkness was my ally, was when I closed my bedroom door. My only illumination was a little sliver of light by the bottom of my door, coming from the bathroom down the hall.

In the brooding darkness, I had my own quiet territory to reflect on my young life. And when I heard Brian Wilson sing his heartbreaking autobiographical melody, In My Room, for the first time, at my Bar Mitzvah, for God’s sake! I immediately knew that we shared that odd sense of being free and imprisoned in the very same space. 

There’s a world where I can go

To tell my secrets to

In my room

In my room (in my room)

In this world I lock out

All my worries and my fears

In my room

In my room (in my room)

Do my dreaming and my scheming

Lie awake and pray?

Do my crying and my sighing

Laugh at yesterday?

Now it’s dark, and I’m alone

But I won’t be afraid

In my room

In my room (in my room, in my room)

In my room (in my room, in my room)

My guess is that John Roedel loves that song as much as I do.

Yom Kippur comes from a dark place. It’s a scary proposition to consider how we’ve hurt others and imagine seeking forgiveness for those wrongs. It means being vulnerable. It means acknowledging that sometimes we are not doing our best. We are not looking out for others. We are flawed. And then there’s the chance that someone will come to us and ask us to forgive them. That’s scary, too. It means daring to consider the possibility that we can release our grudge, our clenched jaw, our sense of victimhood and say, “Ok, I’ll never be indifferent to the pain you caused me, but your request to be forgiven moves me to move away from this place of pain that holds us both back and emerge to a better place.”

I hope all of us gather for Kol Nidre, streaming or in person, and dedicate ourselves to acknowledge the dark – AND – reach for the light. We can do this.

The Stern Gang wishes you a sweet new year and a fast that provides space for meditation and truth.

This edition of Before Shabbat is the last of the season. It will return to a screen near you on August 18^th. That date marks the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul, the run-up to the High Holy Days. Elul is the month when we clean up our mental hard drive and take stock of our spiritual status. It’s a gentle and liberating process that prepares us for the complex tasks of repentance and forgiveness.

But that’s two months away. Right now, it’s time to take a deep breath and chill out. If you’re lucky, summer provides some space to relax and do less. Stress is cumulative, so releasing the pressure valve is a good thing.

I look forward to that practice.

In the meantime, my daughter Zoe is getting married next week. The marriage of one’s child is a profoundly emotional experience. They talk about how the parents give the bride away. That’s a very dated, if not a downright non-pc description of what happens. This phrase is rooted in historical practices when daughters were considered property and marriages were transactions between families. The father “gave away” his daughter to the groom in exchange for a dowry or other considerations.

Believe me, such is not the case. My daughter, like her mother before her, is very much a free agent in this world and demands the equal respect of her family, her community, and her world. Nobody tells Zoe what to do, who to marry, and how to live her life. Plus, her fiancé is starting med school, so there’s not a lot of dowry to collect for the time being…

But there is certainly a transition in our relationship. I feel a sense of loss even as I welcome a new son-in-law into my life. I will always worry about my daughter. I will always want to know where she is every minute of the day (thank you for the ‘Find My Phone” app). And I know now that her partner will be there for her to answer the questions I used to answer. That’s how all of this works. It’s what’s supposed to happen. And I’m okay with that. But it does make me sad.

Our lives open and close and shift all the time. We are confronted with issues we never imagined. Many of us are faced with moments we’ve anticipated for years and quietly awaited, from the birth of children and grandchildren to the death of our parents. Some of us are reeling in the years, tasting the bitterness of regret and the road not taken. This is not a formula for success. We only pass this way once, so why not make it a good trip? Rather than mourn the end of one phase, I celebrate a new chapter opening. We aim to give up our acquired habit of powerlessness, the idea that we cannot change, and, trembling at times, crack open the door or the window again to new possibilities, and let the breeze rush into our closed room. We aim to open our hearts, even if that means opening ourselves to uncertainty and even pain.

It’s the truth about aging gracefully, resisting the urge to look back, and then tragically turning into a pillar of salt. I am so excited about Zoe’s wedding next week and Molly’s wedding five weeks later. So much to see in the rear-view mirror. But there is so much to anticipate right here in front of me. There is so much life to celebrate.

Please relax and enjoy some quiet, reflective time.

I dedicate this Before Shabbat to our Cantorial Leader, Susan Glickman, on the eve of her retirement. Her love of music and ability to convey that love with authentic joy and kindness is a gift to the hearts and souls of us all. Thank you always, Susan.

This weekend, Taylor Swift is performing at Gillette. You might think the Messiah was in town. It’s all over social media, news, even weather reports. There are apocalyptic traffic warnings and suggestions on what to wear to the show. I don’t know what it is about Taylor Swift that accounts for her extraordinary popularity and the desperation of her fans to see her. I could climb on my high horse and strongly critique her pouty, post-adolescent, coming-of-age music, but I was taught a long time ago never to judge someone else’s music if it came from a sincere place, and I think Taylor Swift seems sincere. There is something in Swift’s music that touches particular hearts, and that’s beautiful.

Like my siblings, I have a deep, abiding love of music. We grew up with a high-end stereo system (McIntosh preamp and amp), and music played often. There was a limited selection of lps: some classical, some show tunes, and a couple of Richard Tucker albums, one featuring opera and the other Jewish greatest hits.

My mother’s singing was more important than the music playing in the living room. She sang all the time: at home, in the car, and while she shopped. Much to my chagrin, she sang along to the muzak at the Food Fair supermarket on Route 66. I was convinced that she would be arrested. Or worse – someone would see me with her and then shame me at school. “Oh – you’re the dope with the singing mother!”

I realize now that no one cared that my diminutive mother sang as she shopped. If anyone had anything to say about it, they’d probably mention that she had a great voice – and she did! If you were to ask her why she sang all the time, she would shrug her shoulders and say that it made her feel good – she couldn’t help it!

My sibs and I have music in our DNA. We can’t help it. Listening to music, performing it, going to concerts, turning up the volume, and needing to hear it are all manifestations of the centrality of music in my life. I need music around me always. Sometimes it’s about comfort. As the William Congreve quote goes, “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak.” Sometimes it’s about the peculiar pleasure I get in listening to a sad song, which apparently has a chemical origin. “It is conjectured that high prolactin concentrations are associated with pleasurable music-induced sadness.”

I want music in happy or sad times, celebrations, or break-ups. I have soundtracks in my head for various occasions, accompanying me on my way. I’ve told my children that if, God forbid, I become extremely ill in my old age and no longer want to listen to music, that’s the time to pull the plug. I identify music that closely with my life force.

Music floats through many souls and twists around lots of DNA strands. The message over and over is that music defines and enhances the human experience. It is fundamental to human consciousness. The oldest musical instrument ever found comes from a cave in Slovenia. It’s a flute made from a baby bear femur by a Neanderthal over 50,000 years ago. That’s older than the cave drawings in France!

But long before the femur flute was tooled, ancient homo sapiens and Neanderthals undoubtedly banged on tree trunks and stalagmites with sticks, clapped their hands, and vocally emitted sounds of joy and ecstasy and pain. Because, like us, they sought to express themselves when there were no words. They knew that words would never be enough even if they had a vocabulary. Like us, they sang and swayed as they laughed and cried because they understood the briefness of life, its bliss, and its sorrows. They loved music and sang because they couldn’t help it.

Sometimes when I get up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, I get some inspiration from – King Achashverosh – you know, Esther’s husband from the Purim story. When he couldn’t sleep, he called on one of his servants to read to him (it’s good to be the king).

Alas! I have no servant to read aloud to me, and I am not waking up my wife… So what’s a commoner to do? Luckily, I have an equivalent source of good reading. I have to read to myself.

In those insomniac times, I peruse my Evernote account, which is jammed with hundreds of articles I’ve clipped, recipes, sermon ideas, links to various music and movie websites, etc. I’ll often randomly click here and there and see what interests me at a particular time.

This is how I found an article from the New York Times I’d clipped 17 years ago. It’s about Joann Ferrara, a physical therapist who runs a special ballet class in Bayside, Queens, NY. Once a week, she instructs eight girls, all of whom have cerebral palsy and other debilitating physical conditions, in the art of ballet.

Some girls can’t walk; others wear braces or need canes and walkers. The girls all know that they are not like “the others.”  They already know that they will never run, jump, or walk without assistance. But their mobility limitations have not extinguished their dreams of wearing a pink tutu and fluttering across the stage. 

Ms. Ferrara heard those wistful dreams and came to a decision. There had to be a way to help these resilient, resolute girls fulfill their deepest, most wistful desire. “I just want them to feel the sheer joy of moving and to be proud of themselves,” Ms. Ferrara said. She assigned each girl an assistant to help them move their bodies and take their positions. “The girls stood in a line onstage, supported by their assistants behind them, lifting and turning them to the music.”  Who were these teen assistants? Angels, no doubt.

Some of our children will cure diseases. Or write a great novel. Or defend an innocent person. Or help people plan exciting events. Or fix a broken bone. Or build a beautiful building. We depend on them to move our awkward civilization forward with good works, generosity, and Jewish values planted deeply in their hearts.

And some of our children will, with difficulty, get by. They will file folders. Or serve French fries. Or bag groceries. And we, their parents, grandparents, relatives, friends, or neighbors, will pray for them. A lot. For the littlest things like kindness and mercy. And we pray that a woman like Joann Ferrara might appear in their lives – and thus, in our lives, granting us blessing, shedding God’s sweet love with her holy acts of understanding and grace. Now that’s a bedtime story worth reading. Every night.

Shabbat Shalom.

rebhayim

In the midst of a hundred news stories that blip on and off every 5 minutes, one particularly caught my eye. Yesterday, four Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep President Donald J. Trump in power after his election defeat by leading a violent mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

My first reaction to this story was a deep sense of gladness. Of course, whenever bad guys get their just desserts, it’s gratifying. So much of the time, justice is relative. Evil people who commit crimes often find a way to go free by using loopholes embedded in the system. We were able to bring these dangerous racists to court and prove their culpability.

My second reaction was a victorious fist bump. The Proud Boys are taken down a notch or two? Yes! Everything this organization stands for is vile: Here are some of the critical tenets of the Proud Boys’ philosophy:

Western culture is superior to all others.

White people are the superior race.

Islam is a violent religion.

Jews are seeking to subvert the destiny of white people.

Feminism is a cancer.

Women should be subservient to men.

The Proud Boys are a fraternity of men loyal to each other and Western culture.

The Proud Boys are willing to use violence to defend Western civilization.

My third reaction was one of hopefulness. Qualified hopefulness, maybe, but hopefulness is just the same. History has seen many groups like Proud Boys all over the world. They are always men with grievances, guys who can’t catch a break, who see others getting some of what they cannot attain. They don’t get the attention of the media. They seem unable to get the best jobs or the best girls. They feel cheated. Someone is preventing them from getting what is rightly theirs because they are white and Christian. It’s the Muslims who have sought their demise since the Crusades a thousand years ago. Black people get jobs and university placement with affirmative action, which cheats white people. Immigrants steal jobs from white people and seek, at the direction of the Jews, to replace White Christian men in every conceivable context. By building a minority-majority in America, brown and black people, under the supervision of the Jews, will run the government. The US will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population, compared to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations. This terrifies white supremacist groups like Proud Boys.

In so many cases, when these fearful white hate groups act out in violence, they are not punished. Often there is a nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude from the police or local governments. The Klan. The Nazi Party. Golden Dawn in Greece are just a few examples of hate groups allowed to spread hate with little official interference.

But not here. There is a commitment from the Justice Department to call out violence against others and call it by its name: sedition. Hate crimes. Fascism. In such moments I feel hopeful that there is still a commitment to the dream of our nation, a multi-ethnic stew of people from all over with different ethnic roots, religions, skin tones, and sexual orientations, and all of us committed to the diversity that enriches our culture and our economy.

I am worried about the ongoing culture clash in our nation. I am vexed by people’s limitless capacity to lie, hate, and threaten, all in the name of promoting a binary vision of the world, a vision of white superiority, Christian fundamentalism, and cultural censorship.

I’m not naïve enough to imagine that this successful prosecution means the end of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or any other hate group. But I am glad, a bit triumphant, and proud that the moral code of my nation, under siege as never before since the Civil War, continues to raise up liberty and justice – for all.

One of the more confusing elements of the Jewish tradition is something called the counting of the omer. In the Book of Leviticus (23:10-11), it is commanded that the Israelites bring a sheaf or omer of the first harvest of their barley to the priest on the second day of Passover. The priest would then wave the barley offering before God – whatever that looked like – to symbolize the start of the harvest season.

This barley offering was part of the larger agricultural cycle in ancient Israel based on the lunar calendar. The barley harvest was the first of the crops in the year, marking the beginning of the agricultural cycle. The offering of the first fruits fifty days later was a way of acknowledging God’s role in the harvest and thanking God for the abundance of the land. The practice of bringing an omer of barley and then the first fruits as offerings continued until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

Technically, according to the Torah, we count the days between the first grain offering of the year and the new meal offering given at the peak of the harvest season, 50 days later. The whole thing is simply a way to count down the harvest season. But over the years, as Shavuot morphed from a harvest festival to the holiday celebrating the day the Jews received the Torah at the foot of Mount Sinai, Jewish philosophers and commentators seized this calendrical link between Passover and Shavuot to push for a more robust religious underpinning.

For we who are not traditionally observant, this counting of the omer is an atavistic relic, a practice we are only barely aware of and in which we are utterly disinterested. It happens. Ritual can only inspire us when it connects us to a more profound truth about our life and how our Judaism defines it.

Lighting Hanukkah candles is a ritual that reminds us of the struggle between light and dark. Saying the kaddish opens our sense of loss and appreciation for those who have died. Coming to temple on the High Holy Days engages us in the joy of community and the sea of time that forever flows forward. Yom Kippur fasting reminds us of our mortality and our capacity to reflect on the deeper parts of our lives.

I could go on and on, bringing up rituals that continue to resonate within us. The fact is that there are also many, like counting the omer, which no longer has credible valence. As post-modern Reform Jews, we are not commanded to do anything because God says so. We do it because we are engaged in making meaning. We define our existence through the lens of Judaism. We are the inheritors of an ancient tradition that we renew as we evolve. Keeping kosher does not convey meaning for most of us, but supporting sustainable agriculture as a Jewish value does make a real impact.

Living as a Jew in a universe where God does not command us to follow 613 mitzvot requires us to decide the boundaries and the obligations of our faith and practice. It’s about constructing a spiritual life on a scaffolding we build together. This is the gift we hand down from one generation to the next: the boldness to think about our Jewishness in real-time, to do something not because someone said so but because it is meaningful and engaging, and life-affirming.

Counting the omer meant something to our ancestors and continues to mean something to traditional Jews today. But it does not speak to me today – at all. That isn’t sad. It’s not a sign of the slow erosion of Judaism. It speaks to how we evolve, define, and redefine the values and practices that most enhance our lives. Now that’s something to celebrate. That’s something to count on.