Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit, 2013), quotes muckraker journalist Frank Norris at the turn of the 20^th century as saying, “The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel – these indisputably are the great molders of public opinion and public morals today.” By “pulpit,” Norris meant such preachers as New York’s Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) whom Martin Luther King Jr. labeled “the foremost prophet of our generation”; and maybe, among rabbis, Stephen S. Wise, who was championing unions even as Norris was busting trusts.

So how did it happen that, at least among Jews, the pulpit voice of conscience has virtually disappeared?

In 1984, conservative Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus bemoaned the absence of a religious voice in what he famously labeled “The Naked Public Square.” He went so far as to predict the end of democracy itself, if national opinion was not enriched by conversation rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As we all know by now, conservatives took him up on his challenge, to the point where, as recently as February 15 (“Republicans, the Religious Right and Evolution,” New York Times), Frank Bruni noted assorted fundamentalist lawmakers sounding more like pastors than politicians by arguing against gay marriage and evolution, but for a national day of prayer as a preferred governmental policy to bring the rain required to fight forest fires and droughts.

Liberal religionists, by contrast, hardly ever call for anything, at least not publicly. Instead of learned sermons, rabbis facilitate discussions on the weekly parashah and lead guided meditations to induce Shabbat quiet. Among Reform rabbis anyway, prophetic exhortation has been replaced by pastoral healing, which, for many, is virtually an obsession.

I am all for synagogues with healing prayers, spirituality and relationship-building. Indeed, I helped pioneer them. But things have gone too far.

The healing movement in synagogues must be understood as a critique of the prophetic style, which took root especially in the 1890s as the Jewish parallel to what Christians called “The Social Gospel.” By the 1950s and ‘60s, it morphed into Civil Rights marches and opposition to the Vietnam War. By the ‘70s, the Jewish community was refocusing its efforts inward, a response to the Six-Day War and the Refusenik movement, which directed prophetic zeal to distinctively Jewish causes. But that was it.

Were we just tired out? Had the civil-rights marches, the anti-war movement, the Six-Day War and the fight for Soviet Jews exhausted our will to change the world?

Whatever the cause, old pulpit-centered rabbis were increasingly castigated as cold, distant, and judgmental: a verdict hastened by the growing feminist critique. Rabbis, we said, should be collaborative and pastoral. Synagogues should be warm and welcoming, a kind of “Beit Transactional Analysis: I’m OK, you’re OK.”

Among rabbis themselves, meanwhile, the critique of their elders was personalized with the vow to balance home and job in ways the old guys never had – to make sure to take time off; and to assure mental balance by setting aside time for personal spirituality. I confess having something to do with the personal spirituality part as well, but again, we have gone too far. We mistakenly saw rabbinic burnout as a necessary consequence of treating one’s rabbinate as a calling, not just a profession; we demonized pulpit rabbis of the past as hierarchical bordering on egomaniacal. And we concluded that because people wanted “warm and welcoming,” that was all they wanted! Let the rabbi be their friend, calling them to personal spiritual wellness and healing.

I am for all of that: warm, welcoming, relational, spiritual, and healing. But synagogues also need to have ideas that matter. Rabbis can hold people’s hand while also holding them to account. Spiritual healing is not inconsistent with prophetic conscience. I don’t mean simplistic reiterations of newspaper op ed columns with a tag-line from Isaiah to outfit them as Jewish. I mean deeply informed discussions of the human condition, our responsibility in a world at war and a nation that is polarized and fragmented. I mean the genuine Jewish call not just to retreat into a deeper life within but to advance toward a better society without.

I teach rabbis; I love them; they are my former students, my colleagues, my best friends, and, overall, the finest human beings you will ever meet. But come on rabbis; we can do better than this. We can be the voice of an enlightened Judaism, in league with science and with God, positing purpose, promise and hope. We can raise the level of national discourse by having something worth saying ourselves – and by saying it eloquently and passionately. If we rise to the occasion, so too will our congregants, because they want something deeper from us even more than we do.

Synagogues: The Detective Story

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

With all due respect, and (as they say), l’havdil (quite the opposite) — I do not mean to equate the two – synagogue success is like plotting a murder. You need means, motive, and opportunity.

Means

By means, I mean the individual components that go into a successful undertaking. They are the easiest of the three to arrange, because unlike motive and opportunity, they are more readily attainable, one by one.

The most important is open-minded, eager, and even urgent rabbinic leadership. When it comes to synagogue transformation, rabbis cannot do it alone, but they can kill it all by themselves – and not through malice aforethought. All they have to do is refuse it their full support; laypeople (who have jobs to go back to) will tire of the effort; the job to which rabbis return is precisely the place where they can kill it from.

Synagogues deserve rabbis who demand excellence beyond mediocrity; who cannot abide the idea of spending an entire lifetime doing endlessly and repetitively just what they’ve always done; and who take time to deepen themselves intellectually and spiritually, so that can deepen their synagogues similarly.

Such rabbis exercise soft charisma – not the bravado of a great figure striding through the synagogue, filling it with magniloquence, but the ability to listen, to understand, and to engage congregants profoundly with ideas that matter.

The second component is lay leadership that enables rabbis to operate at their best. Synagogues need to set priorities that do not condemn rabbis to endless committee meetings at the expense of leadership and visioning. They need to value the rabbis’ need to study, read, and think.

Then too there are most board meetings where discussions are often predictable, redundant, and tiring. Board meetings should send their members home empowered, not defeated; energized, not enervated. Boards routinely handle fiduciary and governance issues (as they should); they rarely set aside important time for generative conversation – matters of mission, substance, direction, and the philosophy behind whatever the synagogue is doing.

Other “means” include a unified professional team and an efficient support network; but also financial sustainability and a physical space that furthers the spiritual well-being of the synagogue mission.

These may not be in place when synagogue transformation begins; proper transformation determines their necessity and brings them into being, after which, they become the further “means” to take the next transformative step.

Motive

Motive is harder to attain than means. Every synagogue is motivated to do something, but that “something” is usually of limited scope — purely fiduciary (balance the budget) or a matter of governance (set up a committee). Only motives that flow from generative conversation can excite to the point of claiming loyalty beyond the crisis of the moment.

Motives for Jewish community were once handed to us as unquestioned givens. What further motivation did we need when anti-Semitism was rampant; when belonging to a synagogue was just the thing to do (Jewish civic virtue, if you will); or when Judaism was an ethnic thing — a matter simply of “hanging” together over bagels, while feeling good about each other?

But we now live in a post-ethnic era. Half our congregants will be (or already are) people not born Jewish and requiring a reason to be synagogued. We now inhabit an Era of Anxious Identity, where we struggle to decide what the various parts of us are. If you are reading this, you may be an American, a New Yorker, a woman, a wife, a mother, a professional, a tennis enthusiast, a musician – and a Jew. But how much of you is the Jewish part? Enough to matter? To be decisive?

A synagogue today – indeed, religion, generally – competes for the discretionary part of our everyday loyalties. Not just our income, but our time and attention go first to those parts of who we are that we consider central: our families, then our jobs (perhaps), and then? What comes next for my hypothetical reader’s struggle to determine her identity? Tennis? She is an athlete. The concert? She is a musician. Planning a vacation? She deserves it. Or, maybe, the synagogue and the Jewish project? She is Jewish!

The Jewish project of the centuries: nothing less is at stake. Synagogues must offer a transcendent motive, without which, they exist for purely utilitarian ends, lumbering on with nothing profound to offer. Great synagogues know the point it all, and express that point unreservedly in everything they say and do. Their members know they matter.

Opportunity

The master synagogue (like the master criminal) puts it all together: the carefully constructed set of necessary means, driven by a motive so compelling that it becomes practically an obsession – a healthy obsession, in our case, the compelling need to make a better world, enhance one’s life with significance, further the Jewish project, and shape a destiny in league with God.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, opportunities rarely knock. They must be sought out. So opportunity refers to the way a synagogue assembles its means (rabbi, professional staff, board, etc.) into a smoothly functioning system that can manufacture opportunity even when none seems evident. For this task, synagogues need culture and system.

First and foremost, is synagogue culture. Many synagogues manifest a culture of conflict, stress, suspicion, blame and emergency. Their clergy and lay leaders work well together only when the chips are down, but otherwise take no risks for fear of failure. They are wary of sharing aspirations, doubts, and new ideas.

Others have cultures of mediocrity: nothing altogether new gets said or done; the loyalists who show up anyway love each other no matter what the synagogue does. No one challenges anyone to do more.

Great synagogues promote cultures of honesty, nobility and trust; of expectation and appreciation. Its members share a single compelling motive – a vision that is too important to languish.

To attain such a culture, synagogues need system — the way its individual parts (the means) communicate and work together. Time is spent building relationships. Expectations are shared with mutuality of support and certainty of vision.

Means, motive and opportunity: These are integral to great synagogues in the making.

How does one determine the proper way to keep Shabbat? I get that question regularly from Jews who do not follow halachah traditionally, but who do not consider it irrelevant, and want a means of deciding such things as whether to write or ride or use electricity then. Their dilemma arises particularly in this week’s reading, where the classic commandment to observe Shabbat is found.

Because that commandment is adjacent to discussion of building the desert sanctuary, the Rabbis interpret Shabbat work to include all items connected with that sanctuary’s sacrificial cult – 39 activities in all, including sowing and ploughing; kneading, and baking; spinning and tearing; slaughtering and writing; kindling or dousing a fire; and so on (M. Shabbat 7:2).

Liberally minded Jews often wonder about these things. Kindling fire was difficult work back then, they say, but flicking an electric switch is hardly backbreaking labor. They miss the point. While they may well decide that turning on lights is permissible for them on Shabbat, that decision can hardly be based on the amount of actual toil involved. The Rabbis’ concept of work goes much deeper than that.

The 39 forms of tabernacle work fall into four categories: baking bread (for the priests); preparing fabric (for the tabernacle’s curtains); preparing a scroll (for writing); and building (the tabernacle itself). These four, however, are part of a larger category: they are all part of the human project of building and preserving culture.

This insight arrives by applying an insight from anthropologist, Claude Levi Strauss, who noted that every human society cooks food, mandates clothing, builds and decorates homes, and transmits learning from generation to generation. This insistence on converting raw nature into cuisine, style, art, and a historical record are what make us fully human.

The rabbinic forms of work, then, are no mere laundry list of random items. They are all exemplifications of the grand human project of transforming nature into culture.

“Work” is not just going to a job or doing the housework, therefore. It is the ongoing human effort to leave our mark upon the world. This human project inevitably engages us, because it is the means of staking out our worth and, in the end, what we will be remembered for. It’s what gets us up the morning.            But at the same time, it’s what we lose sleep over. Shabbat, therefore, is the day that provides a break from the ongoing task of advancing the human project; as if God says, “I hold you responsible for perfecting my world – but not today.”

So here is how I, a liberal Jew, make Shabbat decisions. I consult halachah with seriousness; I then measure my life by its principles, but not by all its specific regulations. One such principle is to take time off from the human project. So anything connected with that project’s work and worry gets put on hold.

On Shabbat, therefore, I do not (for example) write my books, articles and columns; but I do email personal notes to friends and family. Shabbat reading can be about anything – but not connected to my research. I study Torah, but not any section on which I am writing an article. I do no errands; but I drive to synagogue, simchahs, and leisure-time activities that enhance life’s fullness.

On Shabbat, I cherish the gift of family and friends; I fill my soul with music and art, love and laughter, nature and nurture, both solitude and community. My responsibility for the human project will return soon enough, when Shabbat is over.

I have the highest regard for Jews who follow the traditional halachic guide to keeping Shabbat. But imagining just that single path to proper Shabbat observance puts Shabbat beyond the reach of those who find its halachic details unpersuasive, but who nonetheless want to honor Shabbat in a reasonable and satisfying way. This underlying principle of the Ongoing Human Project can be compelling guide to making Shabbat matter in our lives.

Way back at the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), “Moses hid his face, being afraid to look at God.” And for good reason: as God explains later (Exodus 33:20), “No one can see me and live.” Yet here (Exodus 24:10), not just Moses, but Aaron, Nadav, Abihu, and even the Israelite elders, “saw the God of Israel, yet He did not raise His hand against them.”

Why not? What exactly did they see?

Rashi says they just glanced at God; enough to deserve punishment, maybe, but not so much that God could not postpone it, to avoid marring the joy of revelation.

That’s not a great answer to our philosophically inclined commentators, who offer an alternative solution, dependent on Maimonides’ understanding of prophecy. God cannot be seen, they point out, because God is invisible. Moses and his party must, therefore, simply have intuited a prophetic vision of God, Such a vision, says Maimonides, arises out of the combination of three perfected character traits: reason, imagination and morality — precisely the three hallmarks, incidentally, that Immanuel Kant would later celebrate as the essence of humanity: pure reason, aesthetic judgment, and the moral law.

But how could all those priests and elders have attained the prophetic capacity that we reserve for Moses alone?

We should supplement Maimonides, then, with the view of Judah Hechasid, the leader of German mysticism following the Crusades. Judah composed Shir Hakavod, (“Song of Glory,” called also Anim Z’mirot) a daring anthropomorphic description of God that is still recited in traditional synagogues at the end of Musaf — as if he had actually perceived God in human form. But Judah was more sophisticated than that. He believed God has two aspects: the ultimate and hidden side that no one sees; and a “visual translation,” so to speak — an emanation from the concealed part, in knowable human form, the way a shadow of something hidden from sight might be projected upon a screen. How else can we know an unknowable God? Surely God must project at least a hint of what divinity is like.

Return now to Maimonides, for whom ultimate seeing is more than visual. All animals see; but human beings “see” prophetically. We may not all be prophets, any more than we are all brilliant philosophers, accomplished artists, and perfected moral agents, but we all experience reason, imagination, and morality to some degree. And the way we best express this higher-order “seeing” is through speech.

There are exceptions: artistic geniuses like Picasso and Beethoven who transcend pure speech in providing the imagination of greatness; but most of us speak our worlds into being. The side of the divine that God shares with us, in the philosophy of Judah Hechasid, may not be, as Judah thought, an actual sighting of God. More likely, it is the manifestation of whatever it is that prompts us to grasp for language of the divine – what we call the “sacred.”

Over 100 years ago, Emil Durkheim, the Jewish founder of modern sociology wondered where words and concepts come from. How do we get the idea of “allness,” for instance – and then words like “all,” “eternity” and “forever”? He denied the standard philosophical reasoning that attributed such ideas to the internal working of our minds, acting independently. Ideas, Durkheim insisted, are prompted by external experiences, which then evoke words – especially, Durkheim thought, the word, “sacred.”

A lesser word does not do justice to experiences like moments of love, the kindness of strangers, scientific breakthroughs , and beauty that takes the breath away. The word “sacred” arose when, from the human side, the Israelites on the mountain put together reason, imagination and morality to exercise prophetic vision; while God offered a glimpse of what those three elements might reasonably strive to comprehend.

What Moses and the Israelite leaders saw that day was not the face of God, but possibilities that demanded a new word: “sacred.” And we have been striving for it ever since.

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Three is the critical number. On that, both sides agree. Three generations, that is: the third generation is a turning point.

But “turning point” to what? There, the two sides differ. For Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan, three successive generations of Torah scholars guarantees that “Torah will never depart from their offspring” (BM 85a). Sociologist Marcus Lee Hanson, however, warns that after three generations, family traditions die. For Rabbi Yochanan, a third generation ensures continuity. For Professor Hanson, it spells continuity’s demise.

Who is right?

Our own experience favors Hansen. His study of ethnic communities showed that immigrants (the first generation) love tradition. Their children reject their parents’ nostalgia. The grandchildren try to recover what their parents rejected. But the game ends there, at the third generation, because the fourth generation just doesn’t care.

American Jews today are living this fourth-generation nightmare, watching our young people identify as Jewish but remain “neutral to negative” about Jewish causes, Jewish charity, Jewish learning, and a Jewish future.

But maybe Rabbi Yochanan is on to something. He is discussing Torah, not ethnicity, and our commentators cite him in connection with the commandment in this week’s Torah reading (Bo) to tell our children the story of leaving Egypt.

Whether we have a future depends on what we take that story to be. Will it be historical memories of anti-Semitism, or even a Jewish state like all other states but speaking Hebrew on the streets – however much that moved so many of the older generations to tears of joy? Or will it be something eternal and profound: a call to believe in the Jewish mission of the centuries, of which both Israel and we may be a part?

Believing, alas, is what American Jews do most poorly. By believing, I mean no blind acceptance of the Exodus account in all its detail. It is a story more than it is history. What matters is the meaning we find in it. Telling it at our seders should evoke gratitude and wonder at the sheer thought of being part of something transcendent: a divine plan, no less — being covenanted into history to accomplish great expectations.

Most seders nowadays have traded in gratitude and wonder for fun family get-togethers, updated, perhaps, with activities and toy frogs to amuse the children. They may briefly flirt with seriousness when we enlarge the tale to include the Shoah and Israel, but, like it or not, these provide no transcendent meaning for the fourth generation, the one who Hansen says “just won’t care.” Yes, trips to Israel are important, and yes also, we should never forget the murdered 6,000,000, but neither is enough to sear the fourth generation’s soul the way it does their elders’.

By contrast, what would happen if we treated the seder as earnestly as we do Yom Kippur? Not for confessions of sin but for professions of belief: the insistence that the grand design of history took a turn for the better when an ancient people said, “Enough of slavery! We are on our way to Sinai, to a life of promise, and to God.”

The Haggadah’s famous “Four-Sons midrash” says that our story varies with the wisdom, wickedness, or foolishness of the child who asks. Our issue, however, is less the children asking than the parents answering. We are not wicked, but judging by how we squander the seder by replacing faith with fun, we are not all that wise either. Children should leave the seder table entranced, not entertained, by elders who believe they are still charged with a God-given task. Hearing their parents assert their faith in that age-old Jewish calling might really make this night “different from all other nights.”

Remember the child who doesn’t even know how to ask? We are the adults who don’t know how to answer. We are long on historical memory; short on faith that it means anything. And that is the recipe for disaster. Just ask Hansen.

Parashat Vay’chi

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

A football team with a losing season keeps its spirits high by joking, “The other teams may get the wins but we have all the good cheers.”

There is something to be said for having the good cheers, not just in moments of loss and despair, but in happier times too. It takes the right language to move us on to higher moral ground.

In that regard, it sometimes seems that it is Christianity, not Judaism, that has all the good cheers. So, at least, I am told, on occasion, by Jews who are taken with the repeated evangelical claim, “God loves you.“ Why don’t Jews say that, they ask. Why, similarly, is it the New Testament that says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? Why can’t Jews have that cheer as well?

Actually, we do have those cheers! The Golden Rule was preached by Hillel, before it was by Jesus. And God’s love was standard doctrine among Rabbis back then. “Happy are you, O Israel, for God loves you,” Rabbi Akiba insisted. We don’t lack the good cheers so much as we have just stopped cheering.

It’s not those cheers alone that I have in mind. I mean also other ideas and concepts that deepen life’s meaning.

Take the sense that we are gifted to be alive, and charged with caring for God’s universe; that we are born with purpose; and that our worth as individuals transcends the money we are lucky to have and the education we are fortunate to get. Christians have words for all of this: “calling,” “stewardship,” and “ministry.” The idea, simply put, is that we are called to fulfill our purpose in life, that we are stewards of whatever falls into our hands as the area of that calling, and that we become ministers toward that end.

Words like “calling,” “stewardship” and “ministry” matter, because they evoke a mindset that otherwise eludes us. How different life becomes when we believe that we are placed on earth as “ministers” of a higher purpose – like ministers of government who further human destiny; that as “stewards,” we must keep faith with what is in our care; and that we are “called” to fulfil that “stewardship” as our distinctive “ministry.” Why can’t Jews have cheers like this?

Granted, “calling,” “stewardship,” and “ministry” do not sound very Jewish. But that is because English was largely developed by the intellectual elite who served the Church. Over time, Christianity has cornered the market on its cheers. But only in English! We Jews have them all – in the original Hebrew!

Take “calling.” The middle chapter of Torah is labeled Vayikra, “God called,” the implicit lesson being that we are indeed “called” to the way of life that Vayikra details: sacrifice for others and seeking the sacred on a day-to-day basis.

As for “stewardship” and “ministry,” our commentator Sforno finds those concepts in this week’s Torah portion, when Joseph assures his brothers that he was destined for success because God had assigned him a task — his own distinctive “ministry,” if you will. Sforno calls him God’s shaliach, the technical term in Jewish law for a legal agent. But it is much more than that. Morally, sh’lichut (“legal agency”) means “ministry” or “calling.” Joseph was called to the ministry of stewarding God’s people through the famine.

Jewish law adds depth to these cheers. It stipulates, for example, that even in their absence, principals may be represented by their agents, but only if those agents act in their principals’ best interests. God appoints us, we might say, to act in God’s best interests, given the fact that God often seems so absent. Our “ministry” is to be proper stewards over God’s ongoing creation.

We Jews do have the right cheers – but in Hebrew, waiting for us to translate them and to reclaim them as our own, thereby acknowledging the Jewish commitment to the human condition into which we are born.

[I know this is late. I meant to get it posted in time for the relevant Torah reading this year (Parashat Toldot). But it is one of my best pieces, so I am posting it now — better late than never]

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Why would Esau abandon his birthright? He arrives home after a day’s hunt, smells his brother’s cooking, and trades the birthright away for dinner. Why indeed would he do that?

Details matter here. The first thing Esau announces upon entering the tent is, “I am weary.” Jacob makes him a proposition, “Sell (michrah) your birthright.” Esau despairs: “I am about to die. What good is my birthright to me?” And with that, the deed is done.

Esau deserves more sympathy than he gets, because we are conditioned to treat him as the “heavy.” But God is compassionate, the Rabbis say, so we should be too. Look again at Esau, then.

Are we to believe that Esau’s weariness is pure physical exhaustion? Could this mighty man of strength be so weak that he cannot pour himself some stew? That he cannot think straight enough to keep his birthright intact? Hardly. Take him at his word! “I am weary… about to die.” It doesn’t take much to diagnose Esau as suffering from a malady that attacks millions of us still: Depression.

The Rabbis emphasize the word used by Jacob, an unusual version of the imperative, michrah, “Sell!” It can also be read, machrah, not the imperative, but the past tense, meaning, “She (or it) sold” — as if rather than asking for the birthright, Jacob was observing that something or other had already sold it. Nachmanides indicates what that “something” was: it is Esau’s weariness, ayefut in Hebrew, a feminine abstract noun, and the real subject of the sentence.

On this reading, Esau arrives home at dark, his depression creeping in with the setting sun. “I am weary,” he announces, “ready to die. What good is anything to me?”

“Your weariness has sold the birthright,” Jacob observes.

And the Torah sums it up: “Esau treated even his birthright with contempt,” not because he is too tired to think clearly, but because his very soul is so weary of the world, that he is ready to die.

Thousands of readers will now recognize Esau in themselves or in those they love. Sufferers of depression present themselves as strong and filled with promise, while inside, they are weary beyond belief. Their own birthright — fresh air, sunshine, life itself — seems meaningless. People ask them to snap out of it — as if they could. But they cannot. They can barely get out of bed in
the morning. Like Esau, they are oh so weary — ready to die.

How, we may wonder, does Esau fare in the end? Years later, returning from servitude to Laban, Jacob encounters his brother who has done quite well for himself. He is wealthy, thriving, a man with family, land, and servants. But Jacob overlooks the obvious to peer into Esau’s soul. Having recognized, once, how “Esau’s weariness has sold his birthright” Jacob now judges anew. “Looking into your face,” he says, “is like looking into the face of God” (Gen. 33:10).

Jacob recognizes Esau’s depression as a thing of the past: his brother’s face, once weary, now shines with divine radiance. With his new-found peace of mind, Esau can even forgive Jacob for taking advantage of him when they were children. He kisses Jacob, assures him he is content with life, and calmly takes his leave.

Esau is a case study in hope. If Esau can be transformed into a mirror of the divine, then so can we. But first we must decide that daily weariness is neither normal nor necessary. Happiness depends on the inner life of the soul, and the soul can find the most surprising cures, even when we least expect them.

In our day, God stores up miracles in medical discoveries. If you are weary unto death, find a doctor. Decide that you have had enough of sadness. It is never too late to learn to shine like God.