Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.

Years ago when I wrote the Faculty Blessing for the New York HUC Ordination, I included the wish that the ordinees’ be blessed with devoted students. The fullness of that wish became abundantly clear this past Saturday night, as we celebrated 150 years of Reform Judaism in North America, and my own students over time presented me with a book in my honor: Communities of Meaning: Conversations on Modern Jewish Life Inspired by Rabbi Larry Hoffman. A few people spoke; a cantorial choir actually sang to me as I received the book. No wonder I was, and still am, overwhelmed by intense gratitude.

The editors, Rabbis Lisa Grushcow and Joe Skloot, largely kept me in the dark as the book took shape. When publisher David Behrman finally sent me the advance copy, I began rationing my reading of it, just one or two of its contributions at a time, and only on Shabbat, to make it last. I discovered that each section features an excerpt from something I had written over the years, followed by two or three short meditative essays prompted by the excerpt – making the book a genuine conversation among magnificent authors from all walks of life, people I have had the blessing to know; all of it framed in a non-technical way so that you don’t have to be an expert to understand it. 

The Talmud is filled with lavish promises about the blessings that flow from having students, and now, I know why.  

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But I don’t like the word “student,” because it suggests a degree-granting institution with classrooms where people go to get filled up with knowledge that another person, the teacher, already has; and the Jewish model (where a student is a talmid) is so much more than that. A student studies; a talmid “learns.” 

This traditional activity of “learning” carries the Yiddish verb lernen, but just as talmid is more than “student,” so too, lernen is more than “to learn.” To get at an English equivalent, I differentiate “learning” from “finding out.” Learning is what we do when the teacher already knows the answer, and “students” just hear it, take notes on it, and now know it the way the teacher does. “Finding out” is the activity of inquiring about something that no one fully knows yet, and, in fact, may never fully know at all. 

Life’s big questions are always things we have to “find out.” They require  curiosity, open-minded questioning, listening to others, factoring in what experts already do know, and then daring to think creatively. Jewish lernen is this kind of finding out. It implies more than soaking up what a teacher has already mastered. It gives learners an active voice of their own. The Talmud (Ta’anit 7a) thus likens learners to pieces of wood that are set on fire. As burning pieces of wood ignite one another, so learners posing questions sharpen one another’s curiosity. 

For simplicity’s sake, I don’t mind using the terms “student” and “teacher,” because that is all the English language offers. But I understand teachers and students differently. As a teacher, I do know more than my students about technical issues: the history of prayer, for example. But the important questions are not technical: how we should pray today, and what our prayer accomplishes, for example. I have thought longer about such questions, but my students are not inconsequential to the solutions we “find out” together. 

But even finding out can be just an academic exercise, and I have decided that our truest students are not just those with academic curiosity and excellence – much less are they merely those who memorize academic lessons, pass courses and get degrees from us. They are people whose lives we teachers have touched by our kindness to them, our wisdom for them, our love of them, and our confidence in them. They respond in kind: gratitude for the depth of care and counsel we have shown, not just the academic lessons we have taught. I don’t minimize the important role of intellectual and academic excellence. But the official content of lecture- and lesson-plans are just a bare beginning. Academic content becomes Torah if and only if what we teach — and we who teach it — touch students’ lives. 

Rabbinic wisdom likens students to biological children, a lesson we normally take to mean that teaching students rises to the level of raising sons and daughters. But maybe it’s the other way around. Raising sons and daughters is supposed to emulate the rabbinic ideal of “teaching” students, which is to say, loving them enough to see to their formation, their character, and their deepest selves; and then launching them on their own way forward.

Much as they may have been grateful for the academic lessons of my classes, no one honored me last Saturday night because I had taught them the proper origin of the Amidah or the clever way that Union Prayer Book editors drew upon the Jerusalem Talmud to universalize the prayer for healing. That sort of teaching is indeed what professors are paid to do: conduct research, add to the knowledge of a professional field, and impart what they can of it to students. But Jewish teachers are called rabbis, and rabbis impart Torah – not just academic facts but wisdom for life, including faith in and love for the people whose lives our wisdom touches.

It occurs to me then that when I address these “open letters to my students,” I mean concentric circles of people whom I respect and in whom have faith. My students can also become my teachers, because their love for me can match my love for them; and because they will have wisdom that I do not. Sometimes, as the Talmud puts it (Taanit 7a), “More than I have learned from my teachers, I have learned from my students.” 

Never was that so clear to me as this past Saturday night. Thank you, all my students, the students of my students, and their students too – in endless circles of curiosity and finding out. I never wanted to be a professor, actually. I wanted from the start to be a rabbi. When I moved from Cincinnati to teach in New York, I threw out my PhD certificate; but saved the s’michah of rabbinic ordination to put on my wall. Professor is my job; rabbi is my calling. I was never so happy to have that calling as when Rabbis Skloot and Grushcow, on behalf of all of you, presented me with this book. I am in grateful awe of all who planned it, all who wrote in it, and, by extension, all who will read it and teach it to others, in the endless chain of Torah learning throughout the generations. 

Here’s what I know about the war: Hamas is a radicalized terrorist group that would slaughter every Jew in Israel, if it could: think of it as “another six million.” Israel must try to eliminate it. Israel must also try to limit collateral damage to Gaza civilians. But war is hell and there is no way to avoid at least some such casualties, especially because of the way Hamas embeds itself among civilians and their institutions. 

I know something else also: Jews are news; and the media are happily pandering to a public that cannot get enough of blood and gore, this time factual, not fictional, so all the more sensational and saleable – like those “True crime” series, but “True War” instead. I know also that except for ever-new examples of wartime horror, most of the pundits, analysts, and commentators don’t know anything more than I do. Anyone who knows the important stuff, like the Israelis’ actual military strategy, can’t talk about it.

I know also that our thirst to know more anyway morphs easily into addictively following the 24/7 coverage. I will call it “going down a rabbit hole,” even though the point of that image is the endless tunnels that rabbits build, just like Hamas, and the fact that I even think of that parallel is a sign of my own obsessive desire to know more than what is available to me. 

The deeper you tunnel into rabbit holes, however, the darker things become; and I watch myself, and others, lose perspective in the darkness. We, who believe nothing else that is metaphysical, somehow return like the swallows to Capistrano to the notion that anti-Semitism is somehow baked into the universe like the speed of light or the law of gravity; even our so-called friends will eventually turn on us, we say. Don’t they always?

Well, no, they don’t “always,” but even the grandest of delusions may have some truth behind them: witness the anti-Semitism of erstwhile allies in academic circles, for example — scholars who normally thrive on weighing evidence for and against their claims, but who (when it comes to Israel) go down their own rabbit hole of self-righteous liberation politics instead. They are, however (so far, anyway) the exception, not the rule. The great majority of people I know support Israel’s right to defend itself. They cringe at civilian casualties as well, but so do I.  

Rabbit-holing has another terrible consequence. It saturates our consciousness, corrodes our mental circuitry, dissipates our energy, and saps the spirit to the point of terminal fatigue. 

It is time to escape the rabbit hole. I will keep up with the news in a responsible way; if, perchance, there is actual evidence that should affect my understanding, I will attend to it. With a few notable exceptions, however, I will kick the habit of wallowing in the interminable columns, podcasts, op eds, and media posts that offer advice, opinion, and assessment by so-called experts who are really just guessing themselves, after all. Instead, I will think long-term. I, personally, cannot do very much about the war; but I can begin to ponder what we must do when the war finally ends. 

Here is my short list of issues we have allowed to fester; issues that we have sometimes tinkered with but never handled seriously; issues that require urgent post-war attention; issues, also, that we really can do something about.

For starters, we will have to renegotiate our relationship with that part of the left which really is anti-Semitic. For example, I still think black lives matter (in lower case), but I am appalled at the anti-Semitic voices of Black Lives Matter (in Caps). Equally, we must confront the rampant anti-Semitism of academia that I mentioned above, a task that will entail us Jewish academicians having difficult conversations with our university colleagues; and Jews, in general, making hard decisions about what colleges to support with their philanthropy — and with their children’s attendance.

Then too, there is the tragic matter of the Israeli government and its policies. There is nothing good about the reigning Israeli coalition; we have known this all along; we cheered the Saturday-night resistance by Israelis; but we have allowed ourselves to be coopted by the government which pretends to listen to us, and then holds us in utter contempt while continuing its immoral agenda of Jewish terrorism on the west bank. 

Let me be clear: Hamas would have attacked us no matter what; in no way are we Jews to blame for the Hamas incursion. But on its own grounds, we need to resurrect the possibility of a two-state solution and do all we can to break the back of an adventurist right wing that has taken Israeli policy captive, poisoned world opinion against us, and made it difficult for our own young Jewish generations to love Israel as their parents do. To be sure, it is not clear what dialogue partners we even have on the Arab side of things. But we can at least clean up our side of the street, if for no other reason than the moral imperative that we say we represent.

Finally, we will need to invest heavily in our own diaspora creativity. I am, and always have been, a fervent Zionist; in no way do I question the need for a thriving Jewish State of Israel. But the Jewish People constitute an ellipse, not a circle: it needs an equally thriving diaspora, and it is time we poured much more money, time, and attention into transforming diasporas around the world into an entire network of communities where Jewish life flourishes.

The opposite of “rabbit holes” is “blue skies,” where we look up to heaven itself with the endless possibilities of imaginative creativity. While the war is on, we leave no doubt about our will for Israel to defend itself. When the war ends, we should leave no doubt about our will to become serious about an agenda that we have too long avoided. 

Is there anyone who doesn’t yet know that life is a journey? Rabbi Alvin Fine (1937-1999) popularized the idea with his exceptional poem by that name, but the idea has pedigree, going back, it is said, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, however, said only something like that, although a Methodist theologian (Lynn Hough, 1877-1971) interpreted Emerson that way in a 1920 Sunday school lesson, and from the Methodist Hough to the Jewish Fine is not itself a bad journey, come to think of it.

For most of history, journeys happened over roads, so “Life as a Road” is another common metaphor: as in Disney’s Anastasia (“Life is a road and I wanna keep goin’”).

I think about this sort of thing every year as the High Holy Days approach, and I hate to say it, but none of my examples so far – not Fine, not Emerson/Hough, and certainly not Disney — tell the whole truth. They romanticize life too much, make it seem like a five-part Netflix series: a moving tale about overcoming the challenges along life’s way, because it’s not the destination but the journey that counts. 

Well, maybe, but I get a more realistic image from Mark Twain (The Gilded Age) who describes “a not very well defined road, which did not seem to know its own mind exactly, and, after straggling through the town, wandered off over the rolling prairie in an uncertain way, as if it had started for nowhere and was quite likely to reach its destination.” 

That is the real way in which life is a road. We can pretend all we want that life is responsive to  the rules of rational choice, but if we look back honestly, we will probably admit that Like Mark Twain’s road, life seems frequently “not to know its own mind,” then to “straggle” through stages and even “wander off … in an uncertain way.” 

That is my experience, anyway. As much as I look back to find a pattern, I confess to life being largely the product of chance: being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time; the people I met (or didn’t). How is it that I managed to grow up in an economic boom, not a bust? In Canada, just after World War II, not in Lublin, Berlin, or Minsk, just a decade earlier? I never had a long-term plan to become an expert liturgist (which I had never heard of until I practically already was one).

Then too, there is the way “the road had started for nowhere and was quite likely to reach its destination.” I first read that line as Mark Twain had intended it: it’s just plain funny! With life in mind, however, I stopped laughing. Life too starts for nowhere and inevitably (not just “quite likely”) gets there in the end – the nowhere of our death. In our last moments, we may think back to how we planned on getting to one “somewhere” after another; how luck, good and bad, got us to a variety of “somewhere elses”; and how we are finally running out of any “somewhere” to be, because however long our body may still hang around, the “I”, the “me”, the “person,” who now barely inhabits that body, is about to exit time and space – and be “nowhere.”  It doesn’t take the Talmud for us to know it; but the Talmud does say it. We will die against our will, and among the things we cannot know, the one at the very top of the list is the day that death will find us (Avot 4:29, Pes. 54b) – and we will be “nowhere.”

The High Holy Days are nothing, if not a sustained confirmation of life’s tenuous uncertainty. I don’t especially like that confirmation: who would? But serious religion raises serious reflections, and in the end, I am always glad to have spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on more solemn fare than watching the US Open or finding another good restaurant in which to while away an evening. 

I know the High Holy Day prayer books very well – I have helped edit more than one – and I confess that they are massive, crowded with verbiage, and full of imagery that no longer resonates with us. Indeed, the liturgy is so impenetrable at times, that it’s easy to get lost in the prayers without actually praying. Here’s one of the things I do to extricate myself from spiritual disaster.

I try each year to find just one single prayer that promises to touch my life. For a while, I linger there, while everyone else is moving on. I eventually catch up, but I remember my prayer’s page number so I can return to it, when other prayers lose or bore me. This year, as I ponder life being a road that wanders (we know not where) and then ends in “nowhere” (we know not when), I suspect that I will stop at a prayer called Hayom, “Today,” because however tenuous my tomorrows may be, my todays are present and real.

Today, strengthen us,

Today bless us,

Today, exalt us,

Today, show us kindness.

Today, inscribe us for a good life.

Our “todays” are destinations along the road; and life is just as much each daily destination as it is the road or journey through them. “Todays” are also mysteries, chance meeting points in time and intersections in space, where different people’s life trajectories miraculously coalesce, as if, for today, we have all stopped together for the same red light. By tomorrow the light will change and we will go our separate ways. Who knows where the people I meet today are going? Who knows what they are going through? For some, today is non-stop brilliant sunshine and bluebirds of happiness. For others today is physical or mental misery that feels like torture. 

Hence this year’s prayer choice: “Today.” We spend too much time plotting a path to the tomorrows that we cannot control; too little time harvesting our todays that are actually upon us. It is not nothing, each and every day, to have feel strength enough to go on; and to carry others whose strength is temporarily spent; to realize that we are blessed and to share the blessing amply; to feel exaltation and to lift up those who are ground down; and both to give and to receive as much kindness and goodness as our soul can find. 

“Today,” we pray, may we know all this, not just the “today” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but all our “todays,” for the “todays” are all we have.

Today is my birthday, an unimportant one, mind you, my 81^st, nothing like the big “80” of a year ago. Still, it is a birthday, so now what? 

I have come to see birthdays not just for their cake and parties; nor even as enforced moments to celebrate (or to rue) the passing of time; but as opportunities to look back and ahead, to take stock of what we have become and what we still can be. Life is properly likened to an art, the art of living, as if we are both the work of art and the artist. Artists regularly step back from their work to get perspective. We artists of life can use birthdays to appreciate ourselves as our own artwork.

The art of living is more like a collage than a painting, because collage is three-dimensional, with layers on top of layers. So too with life: as we grow in years, we are never completely able to erase the more difficult or painful layers of what we were, but we can apply new layers over them. If we look honestly at our life as art, we see layers that are bright with joy, but also somber hues of unhappier times: traumas that came out of nowhere; the multiple ways we went wrong; times of embarrassing foolishness, even stupidity. Yet here we are: survivors.

Our Jewish ancestors who had survived an external threat to their lives developed the custom of declaring the day of their escape a personal Purim. I think birthdays should be a personal Yom Kippur, an introspective look at who we are, but with a friendly feeling, not the dread, the accent on sin, the heaviness, and the fasting.

This very view accords with a halachic study that I discovered many years ago, on whether Jews should even keep birthdays in the first place. I gave it to a then still Student-Rabbi Elaine Zecher, who analyzed it as her rabbinic thesis.^[1] Good news: the majority of rabbinic authorities say we can, and probably should, celebrate birthdays, especially as aging makes us increasingly grateful to be alive—certainly at age 70 and older; but some say, “Start at 50”; and, yes, some say “any age at all.”  

We are to say the blessing thanking God for “bringing us to this moment” (shehechiyanu); maybe even frame the birthday party as a religiously incumbent feast (s’udat mitzvah); certainly give charity (tz’dakah); but most important, “look back and take stock of what we have done” – like my friendly Yom Kippur.

Taking stock, however, implies not just looking back but looking ahead; and that, I think, is where our customary birthday wish comes in. Only after we blow out the candles and make a wish, do people sing Happy Birthday, as if to say, “May your wishes come true!” Who knows what wishes people make? You’re not supposed to say, so I have no evidence. But I bet they vary with the stages of our lives. 

I divide our life cycle into five such stages, one for each book of Torah, each one with its own inbuilt cluster of wishes. Genesis (B’reishit) is childhood, when wishes are elemental, unplanned, and transient. Exodus (Sh’mot) brings young adulthood, with wishes that revolve about the excitement (and insecurity) of becoming our own person, establishing our name in the world, and taking on responsibility, as Israel did at Sinai. In Leviticus, the middle book, wishes emerge from the mundane stuff of ordinary life, our middle years, when we are “called” (as in the Hebrew name, Vayikra) to everyday work and sacrifice, for ourselves and for those who depend on us. Numbers (B’midbar –“in the wilderness”) brings frantic wishes to get out of the desert of our mid-life crises. In Deuteronomy, we, like Moses, look back on what we have done, and formulate wishes for life’s final chapter, before we die. 

But wishes, by their very nature, are unlikely to come true – hence the expression, “wishful thinking.” So regardless of our stage in life, no matter what our circumstances, we need a birthday wish that is dependent on our own internal resources, not the external buffeting of pure sheer luck. And we get that too from treating birthdays as a friendly Yom Kippur.

The Yom Kippur of the High Holy Days is much more than just a day to acknowledge our sins. More broadly speaking, it is the opportunity to appear before God exactly as we are and without pretense — something we dare to do, because God is imagined as the ideal parent, the mother or father who sees right through us, acknowledges our shortcomings, but nonetheless, knows us, loves us, and insists that we are good. A million forces and people here on earth do their best to frustrate our wishes and leave us feeling bad: about what goes wrong, about who we are or think we ought to have become, about how we have failed, about how we are unloved or even unlovable, and on and on and on. The thing about Yom Kippur, even with all its somberness, is that we know in advance just how it ends: with assurances we are worthwhile, loved, of value, able to go on.

All the more so on birthdays, then, the friendlier Yom Kippur that I have in mind. On the actual Yom Kippur, we appear before God. On birthdays, I picture God appearing before us, an invisible invited guest who applauds our blowing out the candles, and leaves us with the gift of self-esteem, inner strength, and assurance that, come what may, the next year can be at least manageable, and maybe even more: joyous, rewarding, the happiness of “Happy Birthday” spilling over to sustain us. Armed with this divine gift, we may greet the next year of life — my 82^nd, your 28^th, 47^th, 64^th, or whatever – with peace of mind and with confidence, once the candles are blown out, the cake is eaten, and the party is over.   

^[1] Elaine Zecher, Birthday Celebrations and Personal Spirituality in the Rabbinic Tradition (Unpublished Rabbinic Thesis, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1988). Cf. Chagigat Yom Huledet B’yisra’el,  Or Hamizrach 31:2 and 31:3-4 (1983). 

A funny thing happened on the way to Truth: I discovered Ideas.

I still admire truth: everyday truths, on which we depend; moral truths, without which we are lost; and scientific truths about which I am constantly amazed. We never run out of truths to tell, to hear, and to ponder. Like the universe they describe, truths are ever expanding – and intoxicating.

But when it came to engaging people’s hearts and minds, there is nothing like ideas. 

The beauty of truths is that they are “true.” They are necessarily contingent – as knowledge grows, our truths can change — but until proven otherwise, we can count on them. 

By itself, however, truth is uncreative: it is just the way the world is. Creativity requires imagination, and with imagination come ideas, not the way the world is but the way it just might be.

Ideas can be forthright: suggestions on seeing or behaving differently. “What if we treat the speed of light as a constant?” (Einstein); “What if we went for a chocolate picnic?” (me). These ideas can eventually become truths. The chocolate picnic gives rise retrospectively to the trivial truth that we had it. The invariable speed of light became the basis of relativity. 

But forthright ideas are just the most obvious kind. Less obvious, are the artistic variety inherent in speaking differently. “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 2:7); “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy  walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 48). People don’t usually speak like that, so when someone does, we take notice. There is truth, we sense, in both examples, but not the kind of truth that is scientifically demonstrable, and in fact, taken literally, both statements are wrong. 

Ideas matter, then, because they capture our attention; they intrigue us: “The historian is a prophet facing backwards” (Friedrich Schlegel); Newton “destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism” (John Keats); but also the opposite, seeing science as a delightful “appetite for wonder” rather than “the anaesthetic of familiarity” (Richard Dawkins). Although there is obviously some truth lurking behind ideas, the ideas themselves are not so much true or false as they are fruitful or fallow. They express more than they inform. They are not the end of an investigation; they are the beginning of one. 

Because truths and ideas sound alike, we risk confusing them, especially when it comes to religion: “The soul is eternal”; “Thy Kingdom come” (from both the Christian Lord’s Prayer and the Jewish Kaddish [v’yamlikh malkhuteih]). It makes little sense to ask if these are true. They may be, but how would we even know? We are better off treating them as ideas and asking how the poetic insights they contain can enhance life; help us through hard times; give us purpose; engender kindness and care.

Treating religious ideas as truths has dangerous consequences, because we think of truth as a zero-sum game: if we are right, then they are wrong – hence, the sorry record of religious warfare through the ages. Ideas, by contrast, picture states of affairs by which we choose to live because they enhance our humanity. When theological beliefs collide (“Jesus is / is not the son of God”; “the Torah is / is not true for all time”), until one or the other is proven  true – and such statements never are – different people can entertain alternative ideas without having to go to war against one another.

Most ideas are salutary. But others are destructive to ourselves or hurtful to others. Take the title idea of an 1864 hymn, “Onward Christian soldiers.” It has quite a pedigree: Winston Churchill found it inspiring in his fight against the Nazis; and it was sung at the funeral of President Eisenhower. But picturing Christians as soldiers evokes a tawdry historical record: medieval Crusaders slaughtering  non-believers; and, in modern times, subjugating (and even eradicating) native peoples in the name of one “true” religion.

In like fashion, Jews should rethink the idea that we are the (meaning the only) chosen people. Do we really believe that God has chosen just us “from among all peoples,” as we say several times in our prayers? Mordecai Kaplan, the outstanding America theologian of the 20^th century, changed it to “with all peoples.” 

Similarly, a standard concluding prayer for Jews, Alenu, begins with the stirring reminder of a single God for all the earth; but then vitiates that claim by saying, “[God] did not make us like [other] peoples of the lands, and did not place us like [other] families of the earth.” The prayer’s underlying intent is clear from a following line that (fortunately) was once excised by censors but (unfortunately) has been restored in some Orthodox circles: “They [the other peoples, unlike us] bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save.” 

Under medieval conditions, such exclusive exceptionalism was understandable. But does Judaism have to depend on our being “better”?

Bad ideas can always be explained away. The Alenu’s claim, we Jews might say, is just a statement of fact. It doesn’t actually say we are “better”; and our historical destiny really has been unique. Similarly, Christians will say that the Christian soldiers are marching to share in the world’s suffering (2 Timothy 2:3) or to fight the forces of evil (Ephesians 6:11-17). But however true these justifications may sound to believers, to the world at large it “sounds” like Christians are celebrating militaristic religious conquest – just as it “sounds” like Jews think we are chosen and others aren’t; that we are, that is, better.

Bad ideas have a habit of just being bad: militarizing religion or exceptionalizing it at the expense of others is hurtful, and on that account, wrong. If we did not (mistakenly) confuse these ideas with truths, we might more easily abandon them on moral grounds alone. But because we like them and want to keep them, we delude ourselves into thinking that they don’t mean what everyone else thinks they do. 

Ideas are the gift of human imagination overlaid upon raw reality, to stimulate, excite and move us. But imagination by itself is neutral; its ideas can be sacred – or demonic. What we need are more of the sacred sort and fewer of the demonic ones. 

What, I often wonder, is religion’s “value added,” when it comes to matters of moment? Religious people are not necessarily more moral. And too often, they seem simply to be adding selective religious quotes that amplify the discussion without further clarifying it. I mean, for example, in our Jewish case, such one-liners as tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) and Tzedek tzedek tirdof  (“Pursue justice, justice”). Sometimes, the preponderance of Jewish tradition does support one side over another, but sometimes both positions can be buttressed by accommodating Jewish citations; and in any case, a single aphorism is hardly what lawyers would call probative.

There has to be something more, some core Jewish values that transcend the convenient cliches, cherry-picked to demonstrate what we would have said anyway.   

By core values, I mean axiomatic understandings that are core to who we are, the kind of thing embedded by Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence: that we are endowed by our Creator with the “unalienable Rights [of] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

It wasn’t altogether Jefferson’s idea, mind you — he built on the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704), who proclaimed the right to “life, health, liberty [and] possessions” – a quotation that is often shortened (for purposes of comparison to Jefferson) to “Life, liberty and property.” Jefferson changed “property” to “happiness.” As a Virginia planter, he hardly objected to property, but he was enamored of another claim by Locke: that “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness” is “the foundation of liberty.” 

As a master of rhetorical style, Jefferson knew too that people respond to sets of three: like “good, bad or indifferent,” “no ifs ands or buts,” “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” and “God, Torah, Israel.” So he combined Locke’s “life” and “health” (without health, we shorten life). He even adopted Locke’s “in pursuit of” language. And out came “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

He chose “happiness” because he cared most about liberty; and Locke, remember, had described happiness as liberty’s very “foundation”; and by “happiness,” Jefferson meant (as Locke did) the “true and solid” sort, not the hedonistic pleasures of the moment, but what Aristotle had called eudaimonia, the serenity of mind that comes from a life well lived.

Judaism too has such timeless verities, but unlike the American example, we cannot always trace their evolution. The ones I have in mind come full-blown, not in a constitutional preamble, but in the liturgy for the three once-agricultural and pilgrim festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.

For all of them (and for other occasions as well), the Rabbis mandated a prayer thanking God “for giving us life, sustaining us and bringing us to this moment” (the familiar shehechiyanu). The Rabbis would have agreed with Jefferson: life is an unalienable right granted by God. 

The three festivals yield three other values, embedded in the prayer that inaugurates each festival, the kiddush. 

Passover’s value was obvious, because the Bible itself saw it as the festival of liberation from servitude. So the Kiddush for Passover thanks God for “this festival of Passover, the time of our liberation.

Sukkot, meanwhile, was remembered by the Rabbis as an annual scene of monumental happiness, possibly because it was the last of the three annual harvests (counting from Passover), the end of the agricultural year, just prior to the winter rains. “Anyone who has never seen the happiness of Sukkot,” the Rabbis said, “has never seen true happiness altogether.” Accordingly, the inaugural prayer for Sukkot celebrates God “who brings us to this festival of Sukkot, the time of our happiness.”

If we had only these three prayers — gratitude for giving us life; the Passover celebration of liberty, and the Sukkot celebration of happiness — we would have a remarkable equivalence between Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, on one hand, and Judaism’s core values, on the other. 

But now, my question: If Judaism provides only what Americanism already understands, where is Judaism’s value added? The answer comes from the inaugural prayer for the festival I have skipped over: Shavuot. The kiddush introducing Shavuot thanks God for “the time when we received Torah.”

The Jewish value added is what we call Torah, which has many connotations, all of them celebrating the gift of divine wisdom. But Torah does to wisdom what Eudaimonia did to happiness: it reinterpreted wisdom as the “true and solid sort,” not academia separated from life, but knowledge that touches life. Rabbi Gordon Tucker once remarked that Torah lishmah does not mean “Torah for its own sake,” but “Torah for the sake to which it is intended,” which (I think it fair to say) is wisdom for the sake of “a life well lived.”

Torah is also a pursuit, however, like Locke’s pursuit of property and Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness, but in the Jewish case, a pursuit of what Jewish tradition calls “learning.” “Learning” is also a verb describing the process by which the noun “learning” is achieved. It is characterized by fruitful dialogue, debate even, undertaken in such a way that the two sides commit themselves to 1. the objective evaluation of evidence and 2. respect for one another – the ideal being “an argument for the sake of heaven” (machloket l’shem shamayim).

Here then, at a very deep level, we find the Jewish “value added.” Like the American instance, Judaism too values “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  But for Jews the “life well led” for which we strive, personally and communally, comes from “learning” – debating and discussing for the common good (“for the sake of heaven”).

What that means, especially in this current moment of national discourse seems obvious. We have every obligation to support the causes we hold dear. But we are obliged to do so in a “learned” fashion, tempering emotional heat with enlightened wisdom. Not everyone will listen to us, but some people will. We call that “drawing people near to Torah,” an attribute of the disciples of Aaron, say our sages; and insofar as Torah is “learning for the common good,” for a “life well led” by one and all, you don’t have to be Jewish to be attracted to it. 

[Once again, thank you for contributing to the fund for adult learning that memorializes my late wife, Gayle Hoover.

Your generosity means the world to me.

To contribute:

In the United States, https://urj.org/GayleHoover

In Canada, https://www.therjcc.ca/donate.]

I went golfing once, and only once, and only because of Harry Levine, a friend of my father’s. A heart attack had forced Harry to retire young, and with no open-heart surgery yet, he spent his days bedridden and bored. On the way home from school, I would sometimes drop by Harry’s house to talk.

On one such visit, Harry pointed to a set of golf clubs. “I’ll never use those again,” he explained. “I want you to have them.” And with that, I carried home a gift that my parents would never have been able to afford. I was, perhaps, twelve or thirteen at the time.

At the year’s first sign of robins, spring, and sunshine, I met three more-or-less friends my own age for my first golf outing. That was when I discovered that my many gifts did not include good hand-eye coordination. I struggled through the first half dozen holes; my friends struggled with me struggling. I left early, giving up golf forever.

Thirteen years later, when my father died and my mother decided to downsize to an apartment, I went back home to help her sort through the remains of her life with Dad. In a corner of the basement, we rediscovered the golf clubs.

We probably should have sold them as antiques, but I had as much business acumen as I had hand-eye coordination, so I said, “Mom, no one uses golf clubs like these anymore; throw them out.”

But Mom, a depression child, who darned socks and pinched pennies, never threw anything away. “No,” she said, “We’ll advertise and sell them to the highest bidder.” 

The next night, as we sat down for supper, the phone rang. Someone was replying to the newspaper notice, and this is what I heard my mother say. “Golf clubs? Yes, you have the right phone number. How much? Well, the highest bid, I guess.” Then a pause, and… “What did you say your name was? Ruth? You want them for your son? Oh, Ruth, this is Ida Hoffman. You should have them for free!”

Who was this Ruth? Although Harry had no children, he did have a younger brother or sister, and that brother or sister had a daughter, who eventually had a son. Ruth was that daughter! Some 100,000 people lived in my city. What are the odds that on that very night, one of the people looking at ads for golf clubs to give to her son would be Harry’s only niece? So the golfclubs returned to their family of origin. Maybe I never really owned them; maybe I was just their custodian, an unknowing guardian of the goods until such time as Harry’s great nephew was old enough to inherit them. 

I have wondered since whether we actually own anything. Doesn’t everything simply pass through our hands for a while? I don’t mean just the obvious things, like pots and pans and clothes and car, or the artwork on the wall. I mean also life’s intangibles: the way my mother made colored cookies, and brought some to my next-door neighbor Mr. Hearne, who couldn’t work because he had been gassed in World War One. Memories too are not our own, so much as they are ours to curate and bequeath to others. 

At Costco today, the man who pushes the shopping carts onto the ramp greeted me with, “Hello young man! How are you?” “Fine, thanks,” I responded. “But I’m not young. I’m older than you.” “Maybe,” he said, “But think how old the universe is. We’re all young by comparison.” 

Yes, we are all very young, I now think. We hardly have time to make anything our own. The midrash is right (Ecc. Rab. 5:21): “We enter the world with hands clenched, as if to say, ‘The world is mine.’ We leave it, hands wide open, as if to say, ‘We can’t take anything with us.’” Even our bodies are just on loan. They will be remembered in pictures on other people’s desks. 

The point of life isn’t to own things but to make them part of the story of who we are; and to pass them on with love and a spot of wisdom to the custodians of memories who come after us. When they remember us, after we have died, they will tell those stories: the food we made, the candles we lit, the books we loved. You wouldn’t even know the name of Harry Levine, had he not owned some golf clubs and passed them along to me — a story that I now tell you. 

So we don’t really own anything, except as temporary stuff of life which inevitably wears out, gets recycled, or, at best, gets passed along for a generation or two, and only then gets lost in the reaches of time. Our bodies are no exception. But for the fact that we are more intimately attached to them, to the point where they die when we do, we don’t really own them either. 

But then, I wonder, who is the “we” whose possessions were never “ours” to begin with, and whose body comes and goes as well?  Philosophical materialists insist that there is no “we”; that the “self” is a fiction of our imagination; that the imagination is just a product of the brain, which itself is part of the body, a thing among things.

But I am no philosophical materialist. I am a rabbi who is pretty sure my tradition has it right when it thinks there is a self beyond the permutations of the brain, beyond all the stuff that eventually wears out, decomposes, and dissipates into dust. The real “me,” the real “you,” is a deeper self that preceded our being born and that lasts beyond our death: the self we call a soul.

Life is the mystery of a soul, born into the world within a body and with things for it to manage temporarily. The record of how we manage it all lives on in stories: stories, we hope, of kindness that never dies; a keren kayemet (the Rabbis would say), a “lasting capital accumulation” of goodness that increases through time. Our real selves, our souls, then retire to the beyond, their work completed. 

[First, many thanks to all of you responded so generously to my last letter. Your support means the world to me.]

And now: Letter 45, “Rethinking the Diaspora”

Credit Marx and Engels. The world has always had workers, but they had no consciousness of themselves as such until Marx and Engels told them so, most famously in their Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!” Now they knew: they were “workers,” and “of the world,” no less. Communism was a dead-end disaster, but collective consciousness armed workers worldwide to unionize and change history. 

Apply that Marx/Engels insight to women, and you get feminism. Apply it to the Black experience in America and you get Black Lives Matter. What if we apply it to Jews?

Jewish peoplehood has been likened to an ellipse, not a circle, because it has two centers: the Land (now the State) of Israel; and the diaspora. With the Roman destruction of the former, the latter predominated: the Babylonian Talmud, a golden age in Spain, and so forth. Nevertheless, in the Jewish imagination, diasporan life was perceived as a sorry state of exile, a temporary condition until we get back home to Zion. Three times a day, we prayed for that return. “I am in the uttermost west,” sang our 12^th-century Spanish poet Judah Halevi, “but my heart is in the east.”   

We never did all move back to Zion, however. Instead, the diaspora continued producing ever more golden ages: Rashi and his school of biblical/Talmudic interpreters in 11^th/12^th-century France and Germany; Maimonides in 12^th-century Egypt; the flowering of Talmudic study in 16^th/17^th-century Poland and Lithuania; Hasidism a century later; all our modern movements, from Reform to Orthodoxy – a product of 19th-century Germany and America. 

We have inherited all this, but without the diasporan pride that it deserves. The trifecta of Czarist persecution, Nazi nightmare, and Stalin’s purges cast doubt on the entire diasporan enterprise. Then came deliverance, the realization of the Zionist dream, and our adoption of a secular version of the rabbinic return-to-Zion story. We preached moving to Israel (aliyah) as a virtue, celebrated anyone who undertook it, and sent our children to Israel to see what real Jewish life looks like: the Land of the Bible, even a biblical zoo, modern Hebrew in the streets, a Hebrew University, a genuine Jewish state, a Jewish army even! 

By contrast, we treated the diaspora, even here in America, as the leftover dregs of ersatz Jewish life awaiting outright assimilation. Never mind the host of Jewish Nobel-prize winners (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jonas Salk, Richard Feynman, Milton Friedman, for starters); or composers (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein); and writers (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur Miller). Never mind, as well, today’s impressive list of Jewish scientists, writers, journalists, philanthropists, university scholars, and executive CEOs. Never mind, finally, our own cultural efflorescence of Jewish creativity:  concerts, novels, theatre, movies, departments of Jewish Studies at universities across the country. Interest in Judaism is widespread, even among non-Jews. Jewish numbers are rising. Far from destroying us, intermarriage is showing signs of actually adding to our ranks. We are far from assimilating. 

The disparagement of diasporan Judaism is a false projection of the older generation’s experience onto the future. Younger generations of Jews don’t walk around in despair over what Judaism has to offer outside of Israel. If we want Judaism to persist among them, the last thing we should do is tell them that if they want Jewish meaning they have to go to Israel to get it.   

Let me be clear: I still revel in Israel’s successes. I just want to revel equally in ours, because a flourishing Jewish People demands constructive creativity not just in Israel, but outside of it as well. And I don’t mean just in the United States. I mean the diaspora worldwide which should see itself as an interconnected web of diasporan consciousness that transcends geographical specificity and is independent of the size of any particular community within it. 

Accurate appraisals of size are hard to come by, because estimates depend on who and how you count, and because both the “who” and the “how” have political and ideological consequences. American Jews number between 6 and 8 million. France (442,000?), Canada (394,000?) and the UK (292,000?) follow next. But the issue is not just raw numbers; with proper intentionality and self-confidence even smaller Jewish communities can achieve distinction. 

Take Australia, for example. Compared to the United States, its Jewish population of 118,000 may seem paltry, but the greatest detriment to Australian Jewish achievement is the damaging sense that diasporan life is, by definition, a losing proposition; that it is, therefore, hardly worth all-out investing in; and that the best that diasporas can expect is to hold the line against assimilation while sending their best and brightest to Israel. In reality, Australia’s 118,000 Jews – like Mexico’s 40,000, Belgium’s 29,000, and Chile’s 18,000 – are not inherently incapacitated. They are just unfocused on a vision of their own potential, which would increase geometrically, were they to become conscious of themselves as part of a worldwide diasporan network. Isn’t it time we echoed the Marx/Engels challenge: “Diasporan Jews of the world, unite!”

Because the idea of raising to prominence the entire world diaspora contradicts all we have been conditioned to believe, there are bound to be passionate objections.  But a moment’s thought is sufficient to dispel them.

Do we thereby minimize needed support for Israel? Not at all. A healthy, active, and thoughtful Jewish diaspora is just what Israel needs right now, as a world partner for the Jewish voice in our time.

Is diasporan self-esteem just a rerun of a bankrupt 19^th-century fantasy that Jews outside of Israel even have a future?  Anti-Semitism never dies, does it? Isn’t it on the rise, even right here in America? Admittedly, we need always to be on guard against anti-Semitism. And thank God for Israel and its Law of Return for Jews who may need it. But prejudice need not fester into persecution. A return of the Hitlerian horror with a passive world order that let Jews die is not an eternally necessary outcome. And in any case, as long as there is a diaspora, it might as well be self-consciously proud, united across the world, and partnering with Israel for the sake of a purpose-driven Jewish People, responsive to our God-given mission to be a force for good.

All day, every day, octogenarian Bernard Cottle sits on the same park bench, as if keeping guard over the cemetery opposite. He used to sit there with his wife, a friend explains, and when she died, he more or less took up sentry duty on it. One night, when no one was looking, he even spread her ashes on the earth below, so that (again, when no one is looking), he could still converse with her.

Bernard is a character in The Thursday Murder Club which I was reading as a break from more weighty matters. But there I was, one of the characters, or, more accurately, many of the characters, because the Thursday Murder Club is a set of aging people in and around an assisted-living home. What I share with most of them is that, like Bernard, we have lost our life’s partner, who, however, still inhabits the places where we used to sit, eat, walk, and love together. 

Like Bernard, we eventually think about perpetuating the presence of the person we have lost: establishing what Isaiah calls a Yad Vashem, “a memorial and a name.” The term was borrowed to name the Jewish People’s Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, but Isaiah used it to describe God’s promise that those who lead the good life will receive “an everlasting name that shall not perish” (Isaiah 56:5).

So Bernard sits dutifully on the bench where his wife once sat as well, and sure enough, people who see him remember her. I imagine he must worry that when he too dies, people will forget them both; had he the means, he would surely endow the bench, emblazoning upon it a plaque with his wife’s name for all to see even after he is gone. We all know people who have perpetuated a yad vashem that way: if not on a park bench, then as part of a synagogue memorial wall that lights up at appropriate occasions.

Those who can, go farther still. They choose some praiseworthy passion of the person who died and fund that passion for the benefit of others. That’s what I am doing now, in this second year of Gayle’s death. And I am writing this because I hope you will help me. 

Gayle was a Jew in a small-town Canadian synagogue. She converted there, learned Judaism there, and paid dues there until she died, even after moving to New York to be with me. But hers is just one of many tiny to medium-sized congregations spread widely across the miles, overall under-appreciated for their enormous contribution to Jewish life, despite meagre resources and insufficient clergy who must often work alone, responsible for everything. I wish to honor Gayle’s memory, by honoring those congregations and those rabbis. 

Toward that end, I am establishing the Gayle A. Hoover Memorial Fund For Adult Learning, a comprehensive system to provide quality offerings for adults like Gayle, using Zoom technology to link small and medium-sized congregations across the miles as an ongoing community of communities. We will encompass, as well, the handfuls of Jews in even smaller Jewish communities, where no synagogue exists at all. The program is just for Canada, but it is a prototype that, once up running, will be replicable anywhere. 

Imagine a faculty of all the rabbis and cantors in the system, as well as professors from universities, and experts in everything from Kabbalah to cooking, in a virtual Academy of Jewish Study. Large congregations who can afford quality programming have agreed to stream selective programs to the smaller and mid-size synagogues where people can gather for the offerings, along with a follow-up conversation with their local rabbi or cantor. 

The fund will also mount an annual or biennial weekend retreat for members of participating communities to gather in person and meet the friends they have made on zoom, thereby creating a “community of communities.” 

Importantly, the program has been enthusiastically welcomed by rabbis and adopted by the Reform Jewish Community of Canada, which guarantees its continuity. 

But as you can imagine, the endowment funds I need just to administer it all are significant; and so, I hope you won’t mind as I ask for your help. If you have resources to share, please contribute what you can. If you know others who might help, please pass the word to them. Your support honors Gayle’s memory and is a gift to me. It is also, after all, a great cause, a model for quality Jewish education even for the smallest synagogues that need feel isolated no more. I cannot thank you enough.

To contribute:

In the United States, https://urj.org/GayleHoover

In Canada, https://www.therjcc.ca/donate. 

 For contributing foundations: 

Recipient Name: Gayle A Hoover Fund for Adult Learning

Organization Name: UNION FOR REFORM JUDAISM

Organization Address 633 Third Ave, 7^th floor, New York, NY. 10017 ATTN:  Development Department

Organization Telephone Number 212-650-4140

Organization Contact Person: Felicia Schuessler — FSchuessler@urj.org

Organization Tax ID 13-1663143

How is an adult like me to celebrate Hanukah? I am far too old for presents, as are my children, and even, pretty soon, my grandchildren, who live, in any event, too far away to light the candles with me. Yet I light them, mostly alone – but with an adult message of Hanukah spirituality in mind.

It starts with a single line of an 8^th-century Hanukah prayer — largely forgotten today, but still around and sung by many who, however, are probably unaware of its spiritual implications. 

“These Lights are holy,” it says. 

Now, holiness has many connotations. As the primary value in Jewish tradition, it has accumulated many meanings over the 3,000 years of Jewish experience on this planet. But none is more surprising than this one.

“These lights are holy,” constitutes just the first half of the line. An explanation follows: “These lights are holy: we may not use them.”

Contrast the lights of Hanukah with those of Shabbat. Suppose, one Shabbat evening before bed, you are engrossed in a brilliant mystery novel. Just as you are about to discover “whodunit,” a freak December snowstorm shuts down your electricity. It’s Friday night, however, so you can finish your book by the light of the Shabbat candles. No problem. But suppose it is an extraordinarily large Hanukah candle glowing in the dark. Sorry: you are out of luck. “These lights are holy: we may not use them.” Unlike Shabbat lights, Hanukah lights are not utilitarian. 

That is not to say they do not have a purpose. There is a difference between the use we make of something for our own ends, and the inherent purpose that a thing has in and of itself. The distinction is sometimes used in thinking about art. To appreciate something artistically is to see it for its own sake, not for ours. We cannot, for example, look at the Mona Lisa with the view of figuring out whether we can buy copies of it for the hotel chain we are managing. Great art has, as it were, its own message for us, its own way of speaking to us. We properly appreciate it only when we engage with it on its own terms.  

Judaism’s word for “its own terms” is the Hebrew lishma, meaning, roughly, “for its own sake.” We describe Torah study, especially, as being lishma: studied for its own sake, not because, say, we can get a better job if we learn it. But Torah study is not without purpose; making us better people, perhaps, or surprising us with spiritual insight. 

So too with the holy lights of Hanukah. Their inherent purpose, says the Talmud is to shine the news of God’s miracle of light, recalling the days of the Maccabees; that’s all. We light them so that they may fulfil their purpose, lishma. Simply by looking at them we acknowledge the possibility of miracles. 

But we are to look at them disinterestedly: without our own interests in mind. We cannot read by their light, do the dishes by them, or carry them around the house to light our way. That would be a misuse of holiness. We might even say that holiness is wholly useless. To use the holy is inevitably to misuse it. 

The nonutilitarian nature of the holy has many applications. On Shabbat, for example, that weekly 7^th-day outpost of holiness, we may not work, not because work is inevitably laborious, but because working on Shabbat the way we work on every other day would be to use Sabbat for our own ends. It is precisely by not using it that we gain benefit from it. When we try to use it, we lose that benefit.

Or consider Torah, which, as we saw, is to be studied lishma, for its own sake. The Rabbis warn us not “to use Torah as a spade to dig with” (Avot 4:5) – not to use it for our own ends. Technically, it is even forbidden to get paid for teaching it, because the teacher would then be using Torah to earn a living. Still, for Torah to be taught, we need Torah teachers, so in practice, Judaism allows us to pay them, but only for the work that they would otherwise be doing.

The synagogue too is holy, or, at least the sanctuary is.  Once upon a time, synagogues were single-room structures, not multi-purpose buildings with everything from board rooms to gymnasia. That single-room synagogue was likened to the central room of the Temple where sacrifices once took place (instead of sacrifices, we have prayers, “the offerings of our lips,” in rabbinic understanding). So the Rabbis rule, for example, that we may not use the synagogue as a shortcut (M. Meg. 3:3), going in one entrance and out the other to avoid going around the block in the driving rain. Synagogues are holy; we may enjoy their inherent purposes but we may not make extraneous use of them. 

Last, and finally, human beings are holy. The Rabbis discuss Temple priests who had to walk up a stone ramp to reach the altar where sacrifices occurred. As part of the altar structure, the ramp is holy, so the priests are advised to take tiny steps along it rather than great strides, lest the stones on which they walk are exposed to a view of the priestly underwear. There then follows a remarkable observation about the holiness of human beings (Mekhilta d’ Rabbi Yishma’el, Yitro 11). 

“Now, if God said, ‘Do not act disgracefully in the case of stones, which cannot intend good or evil,’ then all the more so, we should not act disgracefully in the case of other human beings, who are made in the image of the One who spoke and the world came into being.” In other words, we human beings who can intend good or evil are holier than the Temple itself, because we are made in the image of God. Human beings are holy: we are not permitted to use one another. .

What a Hanukah lesson for us, who regularly make the mistake of defining our worth in terms of what we achieve, how much we accomplish, how useful we have been! Hanukah lights remind us that there is a higher order of value than our achievements. Our true value lies in our holiness:  just being, not accomplishing. And, because we, like God, are able to devise good or evil, we are to “be” the kind of person who, also like God, chooses to be good.