Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.

[My last Open Letter provided Act 1: “A Union, “A Community of Communities,” the recognition that “Communities need other communities; that Reform is a movement – many congregations impacting the world together.” This, the second act, turns to that impacting of the world, namely, “Principle and Purpose,” Reform Judaism’s insistence that “Judaism is no tribal faith. It exists to pursue the great and noble causes that make us fully human.”

Here too, the original script was considerably shortened, because of time constraints, so in what follows I have added back in some of the parts that were cut. Where large chunks were omitted (not just a line here and there), I bracket them with braces {as here}. Significantly, in the 1966 letter from a southern congregation objecting to integration, a paragraph was omitted on the grounds that it might be too painful for us to use publicly. I disagreed. I thought it provided necessary honesty about the depth of racism at the time, so I restored the text to include it here {in braces}. 

What I cannot reproduce on paper, especially with this second act, is the impact of video clips (hearing the voice of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, from over 100 years ago, a champion of social justice before we had a name for it); watching Rabbi David Saperstein speak to us from the Religious Action Center; and seeing rabbinic student Kelly Whitehead describe what it means about to be ordained as a rabbi who is black in a movement that is still overwhelmingly white.

Each act ties the Reform Movement to a different dominant image of the human condition. Act 1 featured the human need for community. Act 2 explores the human need to matter.  This act too, ends with ritualized statements, “I am a Jew because….”; a congregational response: “Anachnu modim lakh. We praise You God and give You thanks”; and a version of Halleluyah (in this case the one by Leonard Cohen.]

***

{Human beings are not forever things:

We grow, mature, and age,

And then we die.

Foreverness comes clothed in causes. 

History is the perpetuity of these causes —

The great and noble callings of our species.

So we are Jews be-cause:

Because the human spirit thrives on linking its eternity to causes.

Reform began in Europe, 

With Jews who, having left the ghetto, 

Were leaving Judaism too,

Because Judaism seemed oblivious to causes,

Because it did not seem to matter.

*

To matter is a curious thing.

We are born without being asked

And die against our will;

And in between, we inhabit this curious thing called life:

An infinitesimally tiny drop of personal time

In the grand universal scheme of eternity.

Yet we want our drop to matter.

By linking Judaism to this will to matter,

Reform gave those who were shedding their Jewish identity 

Reason to be Jewish once again.

Reform is insistence on the causes that matter.

*

The romantic, William Blake saw “eternity in a grain of sand.”

We Jews see eternity in a grain of care, a speck of hope, a pinpoint of promise 

In the vastness of the human story 

Which we get to enter only briefly:

Mere walk-on actors for cameo roles in the drama of whole centuries and more.

But roles that matter because we join ourselves to causes.

*

What did Eve and Adam learn from the tree of knowledge?

What insight did they gain that drove them out of paradise,

If not the realization that Eden wasn’t real.

An oasis is not the desert.

A coffee break is not the work we do.

Eden was perfection, 

But it came with a snake

To explode the fantasy 

That we can live forever in such paradise.

Our progenitors learned to enter the world 

Where causes are the things that gives life meaning.

Reform is Judaism fixated 

On meaning, monumentally.

We are Adam and Eve, humanity without a Garden,

Updated for our time.} 

*

Reform imagined a new kind of Judaism and a new kind of rabbi: 

A Judaism that cares about the human condition. 

And rabbis who call us to a world that is better than what we have.

It did so by reading the Bible differently. 

*

For its first 2000 years, Jews had known the prophets 

Only as snippets of Haftarah readings, 

Chanted in Hebrew that few even understood. 

Reform brought the prophets to life 

By accenting their message of social justice, 

Proclaiming an era of Prophetic Judaism. 

Take Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, for instance, 

Whose booming sermons demanding justice 

Filled vast auditoriums

Over 100 years ago. 

[AUDIO CLIP – STEPHEN S. WISE]

*

The most painful moral defects are those cancers of conscience

That metastasize with sinful subtlety.

Poisoning the core of a nation’s very psyche. 

Such is the American tragedy of slavery.

In the terrible war for the soul of the nation, 

The sad truth is: 

Rabbinic voices could be heard 

On either side of the slavery question.

When the Civil War was finally over,

It still took an entire century 

To excavate the American conscience, 

Brush off the silt and sediment of its indifference

And take responsibility as the moral beings 

Whom God intended us to be,

We Reform Jews among them. 

Where had we been for that hundred years? 

*

1865: the Civil War ends.

1965: This UAHC Statement on Synagogues and Social Action

“Judaism offers no easy escape from the problems of life and rejects the device of passing all responsibility for social problems to God… A synagogue which isolates itself from the fundamental issues of social justice confronting the community and the nation is false to the deepest traditions and values of the Jewish heritage.”

*

Only in the 1950s and ‘60s 

did America’s vocabulary begin to ring 

with the newly poignant language of ongoing oppression

and the jangling discords of injustice:

Bull Connor in Birmingham; 

Ku Klux Klan Nightriders in St. Augustine Florida. 

Fourteen-year old Emmett Till, mutilated, murdered, 

and dropped dead-weight into Mississippi’s Talahatchie River. 

But their opposite, as well:

Freedom Riders, 

The Little Rock Nine, 

A lunch counter at Woolworths, 

Rosa Parks, 

John Lewis, 

“I have a dream.” 

Liberty in the making at last.

Acting with prophetic conscience, our movement took a stand, despite objections from some southern congregations, who wrote letters such as this one:

*

To Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the UAHC.

May 1, 1956,

“It was the unanimous opinion of our board that segregation is not a religious issue and not a Jewish issue….

The Jews in this community have been accepted in social and educational activities without prejudice or discrimination. The Jews in this community mingle with the white non-Jews and form a large percent of their country clubs, business clubs, and civic activities in general…

{If integration is had at this time, it would mean 60% of the enrollment of our grammar schools would be Negro students. A large percent of these Negro children come from homes with no special background or environment, and a large percent of them are the result of illegitimacy. It would only retard the white Jewish children, as well as the white Gentiles to have their children placed under this integration and environment.}

Feeling as we do, we respectfully urge your fine organization not to embarrass and injure the Jews of this community and other Southern communities who feel as we do, by having it broadcast that the Jews as a whole are actively working to desegregate the South.”

But the official stand remained. 

We marched for integration,

And issued calls to conscience. 

[VIDEO HERE : CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH]

[MUSIC LIVE: “MAKE THOSE WATERS PART”]

*

Sitting in the Religious Action Center, Rabbi David Saperstein recalls the role we played in striving for social justice.

David Saperstein: “So by the shaping of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … some of the most famous civil rights leaders in America sat around this very table…and crafted their contribution to the seminal foundational civil rights laws that changed the face of civil rights and social justice in America. And for 30 years, every single civil rights bill that was put before Congress, the civil rights community sat in this conference room and mobilized how we were going to support it.
Hy Bookbinder, who was the legendary lobbyist for the American Jewish community, used to say, ‘If the walls of this room could talk, they would resound with some of the greatest social justice achievements of the 20th century in America.’”

*

Those were heady days, the 1960s, 

Messianic, even, to protesters of the time.

But when no messiah came, 

The world moved on to other things; and so too did the protests, 

While the cancer, never fully cured, 

Reappeared in other, devious, ways.

The arc of the moral universe may indeed bend toward justice, 

But only laboriously. 

For the 1960s are 60 years in the past, 

And so much has still not happened.

Yet, some things have.

Student rabbi Kelly Whitehead will be ordained this Spring.

She gave this sermon to the Hebrew Union College community.

*

[Rabbinic Student, Kelly Whitehead: “Eved, the biblical word for slave, is first used by Noah, who curses the descendants of his son Ham, saying they will be eved avadim, the ‘meanest of slaves.’ And so it happens: Ham becomes the father of the African people, who later become enslaved by white Europeans.

Our founder, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, rejected that biblical lesson, but failed to attack the institution of slavery itself. Once the Civil War began, Wise declared that ‘silence must henceforth be our policy, silence on all the questions of the day.’

The Rabbis of our past could not envision that blackness and Jewishness could be intimately intertwined.

Yet here I am.”

*

To be Reform is to draw hope from history 

and shepherd humanity to a better time.        

We stand on the shoulders of generations past. 

But even on those shoulders,

we stand on tiptoes, heads held high, eyes peering ahead 

to envision a future with God’s promises realized,

because of a messiah who turns out to be ourselves.

[MUSIC LIVE: WE RISE]

I am a Reform Jew because I want my life to have purpose: Reform Judaism helps me make a difference in the world.  

I am a Reform Jew because Reform Judaism adds depth to my days: My synagogue is a community of conscience. 

For the gift of mind and heart; consciousness and conscience;

For eyes and ears that see and hear a world crying out for help;

For the prophets of the past, 

Whose call to justice, love and righteousness 

We can renew in our own time;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise You God and give You thanks.

[MUSIC LIVE: HALLELUYAH, LEONARD COHEN]

[Preamble: As I said in my last letter – the Introduction — the script continues by laying out five lasting contributions of Reform Judaism’s 150 years. I called them “Chapters,” but a better word would be “Acts” since the script, after all, is just that, a “script” for a ritualized performance that included music, staging, visuals, and so on. What follows, then, is the first Reform contribution, Act 1, “A Union, a Community of Communities.” 

Each act ended with a ritual action. Seated on the stage, alongside the two main narrators were a set of people whom we thought of as our modern version of a Greek Chorus. At times, they led congregational participation; at other times, they read their own parts together; and at the end of each act, one or more of them stepped forward, and (as if testifying to the power of the Act’s message), recited a sentence that began, “I am a Reform Jew because….” The congregation responded with a prayer of thanksgiving based on the liturgical line from our prayer book, Anachnu modim lakh, “We praise you, God, and give thanks.” 

I haven’t included here all the stage instructions – which reader reads what, when the Greek Chorus speaks, and so on — because those instructions, while necessary for the participants, just gets in the way of someone reading the script for its message. But you have to imagine the flow of things as the spotlight shifted back and forth between the main narrators, but also the Greek Chorus, the congregation, a choir, congregational singing, and, at times, parts for individual readers (or actual video clips from the past) that appeared on a screen. As the narrator named the Act (A Union, a Community of Communities) at the beginning, for instance, many pictures of synagogues flashed upon the screen in rapid succession. 

The two exceptions to my rule of omitting stage instructions are: 1. Congregational readings, which are recognizable because they appear in italics. 2. In advance, we recorded videos of various people being interviewed, and then edited the videos so that snippets of the interviews became part of the script. In this section, for instance (which deals with the formation of our institutional organizations), we dealt with the contribution of Reform to our understanding of rabbis and cantors; and as part of that message, wanting to highlight the admission of women into the rabbinate and cantorate, we interviewed women clergy themselves to talk about their experience. I cannot reproduce the videos here, but where I have transcripts of what they say, I include their names with their words.

Finally: In all the acts, (as in the Introduction), I merged the final script with parts of earlier versions that we had omitted for reasons of brevity. The entire first section – until “Reform was smelted,” had been taken out, for instance. It includes reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s famous lines about the sustaining value of synagogues in the diaspora – an idea I borrowed from Rabbi Chaim Stern z”l, who used the Bialik lines in Gates of Repentance. Otherwise, changes were minor.

As Act 1 picks up, the choir has just completed singing Lewandowski’s Halleluja. Each act concluded with a different Halleluyah setting, a vocal exclamation mark.

So… Act 1]

***

Act 1: A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Halleluya moments require Halleluya people,

Gathered in communities,

Each one, in what the Rabbis called,,

A bet haknesset, 

a communal home that we now call a synagogue.

Without synagogues, we would have died, centuries ago. But synagogues took centuries to invent. For our first 1000 years, we were sustained by sacrifice, bloody temple rites, priests and levites interceding before God with burnt offerings all-consumed by fire, Passover lambs, a Yom Kippur goat released from the verdict of death and allowed to escape into the desert — the original scapegoat, that permitted the people sending it to be pardoned and to be restored to life renewed. The temple went up in flames, destroyed by Rome, itself a final sacrificial victim of those times, a crowning end to the Jewish chapter, part of an era fast receding into history. But in its place, came synagogues.

1000 years of Temples,

And then, religious revolution —

2000 years of synagogues that continue to this day.

From Baghdad to Toledo, 

To Rome, Cologne and Paris, 

Vienna, Vilnius, Vladivlostok,

Wherever Jews settled, 

They trained rabbis and built synagogues, 

For community, prayer, and learning,

To further the Jewish mandate 

To be charitable, kind and just. 

How did we do it? 

How did we survive 

through centuries of change and challenge?

We are not the first to wonder.

Hear our poet laureate from another place and time, 

The dying days of the Eastern Europe’s shtetls. 

Chaim Nachman Bialik endured those tragic years and declared:

“If you really want to know how we survived, 

Turn to the ancient battered house of prayer.

There, to this day, you may behold

Jews with faces lean and lined,

Jews who bear the exile’s heavy weight,

But forget their daily drudgery

In a tattered page of Talmud,

Who assuage their fears and troubles

In the chant of ancient psalms.

A strange and dreary sight.

Straining understanding, defying logic,

To those with no empathy and imagination!”

But if we, here and now, 

Revisit in our mind’s eye,

Those synagogues and times,

Our hearts will tell us true:

The synagogue has staunchly stood,

In good times and in bad, 

For the renewal of Jewish life, 

The replenishment of our soul.

Even as Bialik memorialized 

a dying Jewish culture in the east,

A Jewish renaissance, 

That we now call Reform,

Was rising in the west,

And we are but the latest chapter in that story.

Reform was smelted in the furnace of light 

that dissolved the medieval world 

in the fires of modernity. 

Out of the ashes was born commitment

to progress and hope, to science and reason.

Reform invited Jews 

to join the human family at its best,

by wresting from Jewish tradition

its eternal truths, not just for Jews but for all peoples. 

This was the vision brought to our shores 

by the founders of Reform, 

among them Isaac Mayer Wise,

who walked the streets of New York, and saw

The Jewish poor, the Jewishly illiterate — immigrants all –

but nonetheless proclaimed, against all odds:

“There is life in this Jewry….

I painted the future in golden hues.” 

To mine the gold, he galvanized a movement,

A Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 

The UAHC – renamed now, our URJ,

to convene a network of congregational communities,

a golden age for Jews in North America.

From the Founding Document of the UAHC

“It is the primary object of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to establish a Hebrew theological Institute – – to preserve Judaism intact; to bequeath it in its purity and sublimity to posterity — to Israel, united and fraternized; to establish, sustain, and govern a seat of learning for Jewish religion and literature….”

The Union’s first historic act was founding  

the Hebrew Union College,

that Reform congregations might have Reform rabbis,

where “Rabbi” is a title, but “Reform” is no mere accidental adjective.

“Reform” has substance; it carries weight; it guarantees; it stipulates.

A Reform rabbi is a rabbi committed to some monumental propositions: 

The God who gave us Torah gave us also laws 

of chemistry and physics.

Both Torah and the universe are “books” of God

with mysteries for us to unveil.

The God in whose imagery we are fashioned, 

gave us moral scruples, 

minds to think and hearts to love.

The God who called creation good 

intended us to dance, to sing, and to be poets of our lives.

Reform rabbis do more than speak the word of God from ancient texts.

They contrive, conceive, conceptualize 

how ancient texts bring comfort, wisdom, hope and healing; 

And not just ancient texts, 

but modern words of insight, too. 

As the first Union Prayer Book put it, in 1895:

“Open, Thou, O God, our eyes 

That we may see and welcome all truth, 

Whether shining from the annals 

of ancient revelations 

Or reaching us 

through the seers of our own time.”

Like Torah itself,

the secret of synagogues too is words,

because human beings are verbal through and through.

Masters of language, magicians of phrases, architects of sentences,

of question marks and periods.

We are the people of the book;

A people who loves dearly just to talk;

A people who insists that God spoke the world into being,

A people who creates worlds of our own, through words.

Words studied, prayed, chanted, sung, discussed, devoured. 

Words to touch the heart, challenge the mind, and elevate the soul; 

Words that move us to tears; and that dry those tears with comfort; 

Words that honor the grand privilege of simply being alive, 

and words that protest on behalf of those for whom simply being alive 

is not the grand privilege it was meant to be. 

Synagogues are keepers of the Jewish conversation through time.

From the start, the College did more than just train rabbis.

It claimed continuation from the greatest seats of Jewish learning,

when the schools of Europe went up in flames,

the College saved those teachers whom it could, and brought them here. 

Of special consequence, 

it rescued Jewish music from potential oblivion, 

with its School of Sacred Music. 

Now cantors would join rabbis. 

They would celebrate the Jewish conversation in song. 

In 1883, we ordained our first class: 4 rabbis, all men. In 1893, we ordained our 100th class: 40 rabbis, 12 of them women; 7 cantors including 1 woman. Women has been acknowledged as equal to men by German rabbis in 1845. It took us over a century to act upon their declaration. In 2023, our 140th class: 31 rabbis, 11 cantors, of varied gender identities and sexual orientations.

Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller: “I think by the fact that we were broadening the human spectrum of what a Jewish leader was by bringing in women. That alone. And the voices that we were adding to the table to leadership by being strong women, educated women, compassionate women, and Jewishly literate women. The voice of Judaism through the lens, through the mouth, through the intellect, through the heart of a woman, that changed everything. And we didn’t think of it. We just embodied it. For all of us, the voice of Judaism changed and was broadened.”

I am a Reform Jew because I am both rational and spiritual. My synagogue feeds my intellect and my soul. 

I am a Reform Jew because I am both a Jew and human being: I draw sustenance from Torah that I share with other Jews; and from science, art and learning that I share with all the world. 

For the blessing of community and synagogue;

For rabbis and cantors; 

scholars, artists, seers and sages of our time;

For the gift of still believing in hope and progress for the world;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you God and give you thanks.

[MUSIC LIVE – HAL’LUYA]

Open Letter to My Students 55: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script (“Introduction”)

[Preamble:

I promised I would post the script, bit by bit because of its length. What follows is the Introduction, but a longer version than what people experienced at the actual performance, because time constraints necessitated much of this being cut. For better and for worse, here is the original, modified slightly to provide continuity with the final version.

The script alone cannot provide anything like the impact of the performed version, which included music, variable lighting, video clips, background visuals, two main narrators, and a variety of speakers both on screen and in person. I wish I could replicate that here, but unable to do so, I provide just the barebones script (and, at times, an indication of the music or film clip on which the script depended in the end). 

I am enormously indebted to the best editing committee imaginable. The text was read critically in all its many stages over a four month period by Rabbis April Davis and Danny Freelander. It then went to a URJ committee of Rosalie Boxt (who quite brilliantly organized the music); Jill Peltzman (who, among other things, directed everything that went into the visuals and staging)  Barbara Weinstein (who brought concerns arising from her work at the Religious Action Center, and (deserving special mention) Rabbi Esther Lederman (who oversaw the entire project with wisdom and care). At times others too were involved, in particular, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the URJ president, at whose request I undertook the project to begin with, and whose judgements often resulted in script additions and changes. 

Journalists Dana Bash and David Gregory were superb narrators. I wish I could replicate their voices in this printed version of the script, because it was they who brought it to life with such brilliance.

The Introduction was followed by five “chapters” (each of them an aspect of Reform Jewish innovation or history) and a conclusion. The Introduction sets the tone of the evening and names the chapters, which will follow in later posts).]

***

Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script Introduction

[Instrumental meditative music as we enter;

music changes into the Hanukah motif; background images of lighting Hanukah candles appear on screen; music fades out as the narration begins.]

December darkness is not the world at its worst,

Not for Jews, at least, For whom, December cold is Hanukah’s warmth,

A time of dedication,

To a past that is rich with meaning

And a future that, we pray, may dawn yet richer still.  

But dedication is no orphan 

Untethered to time.

All promises of perseverance, loyalty, resolve, devotion, 

Remain ethereal,

If they are not acted out

Within the real stuff of human enterprise.

The great and noble causes on which the world depends

Exist within the drama we call history

Or do not exist at all.

And that is why we Jews remember.

No people on the face of the earth 

Insists on memory more than we,

We Jews, 

Who have played a part 

In world affairs far beyond our numbers.

From Jerusalem to Baghdad,

Barcelona to Berlin, 

And now here in North America.

“We Jews have many faults

But amnesia is not among them,”

Said Isaac Bashevis Singer,

Who knew that Jews remember.

Zachor and Zikaron, 

The Hebrew words for memory, 

Mean “to point.”

Day in, day out, we Jews are asked to point, 

To direct our hearts and minds and souls 

To the forces that brought us to this day and will, we pray, 

Allow us each to play our part in the universal flow of time,

To move the human drama ever forward,

To an ever better, brighter, day.

*

Three months ago, or so, we celebrated Rosh Hashanah,

Our new year day of memory, Yom Hazikaron, 

A day of pointing back with mythic consciousness

to the time the world was made.

With every shofar blast, we said

Hayom harat olam,”

“On this day the world was conceived,”

Shaped in the womb of God, 

And birthed into existence.

On Rosh Hashanah, the rabbis said,

Kol ba’ei olam, “all who enter the world” 

Appear before God.

Not just as Jews, then, 

do we greet our highest holy days,

But as human beings like everyone else, 

Confronting God’s presence, 

To be reminded of the human project:

To leave the world better off than when we entered it.

*

Three months from now, or so, we will sit around a seder table,

Marking another Jewish new year,

The month of Passover,

For we Jews have not just one but two beginnings, 

The conception of the world and the time we left Egypt.

“This shall be for you the beginning of months”

In the words of our Torah.

So the seder too remembers, 

Not the world’s conception, but the birth of our people,

For as much as we are a religion, we are a people too, 

A people born in slavery to Pharaoh – 

that we might value freedom;  

A people awestruck by a burning bush – 

that we might harbor faith

A people steeped in echoes of Sinai – 

that we might know our purpose; 

We are not just a people, 

We are a people with purpose.

And so we meet tonight as Jews of purpose

To recollect out past

To celebrate our present,

But most of all, to reaffirm our purpose.

….Shehechiyanu v’ki’manu v’higianu lazman hazeh

“We praise you God for giving us life, 

For sustaining us 

And for bringing us to where we are this day.”

*

On a single thread of insight, says the Talmud,

There hang whole mountains of vibrant creativity.

No surprise then that Reform began with such a single thread:

The daring thought that Torah is revealed 

Not just once at some magical desert mountain,

But in every age anew: 

The ever-present voice of God —

Throughout the world’s wonders, 

the advance of human reason, 

scientific progress, 

and insights from our texts and our experience 

as a Jewish People through the ages. 

 

From this single thread came a framework of Reform ideas,

In their time, profoundly novel, 

So successful, that we take them now for granted – and should not.

As the Israelites followed pillars of cloud by day and fire by night, 

So we hold fast to these pillars of inventiveness, 

Which, now as then, make us who we are.

A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Individuals need other individuals; 

and communities need other communities. 

Reform is a movement, 

Many congregations impacting the world together.

Principle and Purpose: 

Judaism is no tribal faith. 

It exists to make us fully human; 

and to pursue the great and noble causes of the human race.

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

The Jewish People has not just one but two centers, 

the Jewish land we call Israel, 

and a worldwide diaspora – North America for us.

Meaningful Worship: 

Prayer need not be rote repetition of prayer-book texts. 

It can be, must be, touching, spiritual, inspirational, aspirational. 

A Doorway, not a Fence: 

Judaism is a response to the human condition. 

It is open to all who find it meaningful.

Authentic Judaism is not doing 

What our ancestors did, 

But doing what they would have done, 

If they were alive today. 

And Judaism, continually updated, 

Is not a burden; it was, it is, and it should be,

Pure sheer joy….

With Halleluya moments

That cantors, choirs and congregations, 

Have belted out for 150 years. 

[Introduction ends with Lewandowski Halleluja video 

by American Conference of cantors and Guild of Temple Musicians)

***

[There now follow sections on the five principles:

“A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Principle and Purpose: 

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

Meaningful Worship: 

A Doorway, not a Fence”

These will follow in later posts]

Because he knew he was thinking, Descartes proved his own existence. I, by contrast, know I exist, and want to make sure I think.

More precisely, given the kind of person I am, I think in a certain sort of way about certain sorts of things — a truism, nowadays, in this Age of Anxious Identity. Tell me who you are and I will know something of what and how you think. 

I like, therefore, to engage synagogue leaders in questions of who they are (and how, therefore, they think). Because I do most of my presenting in Reform congregations, I take special interest in their members’ Reform identity and what the Reform label means to them. 

Most recently, I asked the question of some focus groups assembled by the URJ (the Union for Reform Judaism) to help me think about the script that I agreed to write for 150^th anniversary of Reform Judaism in North America. The participants (who included rabbis and lay leaders) had this to say:

1. Representatives of the younger generation, mostly millennials, often found it hard to say what Reform even is. Some of them went farther and thought Reform as a category largely irrelevant. The future, they said, would feature Orthodoxy on one hand and everyone else on the other. 

• By contrast, members of the older generations, Gen X and Baby Boomers, believed Reform had once been a persuasive descriptive category but bemoaned its disappearance nowadays. Their advice in writing the anniversary script was to “Go deep”: to provide the intellectual, moral, and historical depth that Reform identity once had but now seems lacking.

I was saddened by the millennials’ response, but not surprised, because sociologists regularly describe millennial resistance to being pigeonholed by organizational labels. But that is the problem: “Reform” has become an organizational label, not (as it used to be) a visionary one descriptive of a proud and committed way of being in the world. 

The older informants put their finger on the problem: our Reform movement lacks gravitas. Our institutions are no longer respected as having much to say to the world. Many people say, privately, that they have largely stopped trying. 

But lumping Jews together as either “Orthodox” or “other” is a gross oversimplification of both. Our Age of Anxious Identity is equally an Age of Identity Choices. If increasing numbers of people choose “just Jewish,” it is certainly not because they identify equally as everything, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredim to ethnic secularists; it is because (at least for Reform) there is no currently-compelling visionary content to what we say we are. 

Historically, however, each denomination has presented its own authentic alternative to being Jewish. Modern Orthodoxy devised a halachic life style in geographically dense communities where people walk to shul together. Conservative Judaism excelled at Jewish education, an historical approach to halachah and traditional davening for people who may not be all that traditional otherwise. Reconstructionism, which saw Judaism as a civilization, emphasized community formation — and small-group Havurah communities at that. Reform Judaism (which I know most about, so can say most about) gave us religion through the lens of reason; continuous revelation beyond Sinai; social justice and prophetic Judaism; courage to make cutting-edge moral judgements, like admitting clergy who are women or LGBTQ+; intentionally joyous worship; a new kind of cantor; and emphasis on spirituality.

Some of these movement identities remain healthy, clear, and viable. Judging from my focus groups, Reform is not among them. We have lost our way.

The denominational identities I want safeguarded are not organizational – not, that is, just parallel bureaucracies that thrive on generating committees, holding meetings, and protecting turf. They are visionary: entire Jewish philosophies of being, alternative traditions of Jewish artistry, that should be elaborated, not eradicated. To be sure, people can be “served” in organizational settings that are “just Jewish,” with no particular philosophy whatever: they all have religious schools, High Holiday services, rabbis on call, and the like. But synagogues that become service centers are a poor caricature of what Jewish life should be. Serving is not the issue. Identity is.  And passionate identity is harder to come by in a synagogue that flounders in inchoate generalities.

Visionary denominational identities do not erect boundaries to keep people out. Think of them as diverse photographic slices of the Jewish landscape through time. We properly learn from one another’s pictures, either borrowing or rejecting bits and pieces of the perspective that they capture — but always with respect, and always to enhance our own perception of the Jewish life we seek. Only the shallowest view of Judaism allows us to be every kind of Jew imaginable. Serious Judaism demands choices, choices of this denominational vision rather than that one, each of them constituting a doorway, not a fence; a doorway to a specific Jewish life style, in which we are invited not just to be served but to root ourselves and to grow. 

If denominational Judaism is suspect, it is not because denominationalism is bad – quite the contrary. It is because denominational bodies (some more than others) suffer hardening of their visionary arteries. At worst, they construct visions that only the inner circle of the denominational professionals find compelling, or forget they even have a vision altogether. At best, they let their visions petrify, collapsing them into sterile cardboard cutouts of reality, static repetition of two-dimensional photos rather than a kaleidoscopic vision that is always in process, always offering newly insightful ways to rekindle our passion.  

I am, therefore I think: I am a Reform Jew; so this is what I think about.

You will now understand the script I wrote for the Reform 150^th. I sought to provide an historical overview in poetic/liturgical form that at least suggested the depth of the Reform Jewish vision through time. It was a celebration of Reform as the intellectual and aesthetic artistry that it once was and still can be. 

The streamed version is supposed to be available eventually on the URJ website, complete with visual backdrops, changes in lighting, historical reminiscences, video clips, two exceptional narrators (Dana Bash and David Gregory), a cantorial choir, congregational singing, and more. 

In the meantime, I am going to post the script for you to read, in stages, as my next set of Open Letters. Stay tuned.

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A massive challenge facing Jews today is the story we decide to tell about anti-Semitism. We did not choose this issue; it chose us, with the hate march in Charlottesville (2017); and outright shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue (2018) and elsewhere. These, and similar incidents, however, emanated from the radical right, so we knew what to make of them: traditional anti-Semites of the Nazi variety, a lunatic fringe of sorts egged on by Trumpist rhetoric, we said.

But now our attackers come from the left, and that is what is new for most of us. Exactly how pervasive this left-wing sentiment is can be debated: Well-meaning criticism of Israel’s all-out war is understandable, especially given the TV optics of mass destruction, and the Netanyahu coalition that abandoned the moral high ground long ago. But what about the image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag posted on X by “Black Lives Matter, Chicago”?^[i] The ultra-woke left seems to hate us as much as the semi-fascist right, making Jews the single solitary subject on which both extremes agree. What conclusion should we draw? 

 The easiest solution is to say that anti-Semitism is endemic to the human experience. People Love Dead Jews (says the title of Dara Horn’s influential book). Jews are the quintessential scapegoated minority, the victims of a long list of persecutions, notes David Baddiel (Jews Don’t Count), but identity politics labels us “white,” meaning “privileged,” and, by definition, perpetrators of colonialism, racism, and all that is odious to oppressed minorities. 

Baddiel is a liberal, but conservative writer, Liel Liebovitz warns, likewise (Commentary, August 2021) that “the arc of history is long and often bends toward anti-Semitism—as is the clear pattern that emerges when you study any period of history in any corner of planet earth.”

So there you have it: New Story #1: Anti-Semitism is endemic.

It is only a matter of time until the world turns against us. Herzl was right after all. Only a Jewish state can protect us.

Is this the sad and sorry tale we will tell our children, come Passover this year? That anti-Semites are everywhere and always present, just awaiting an excuse to turn against us? How does such a tale end? At least in the old days, we could escape persecution in one country by taking up residence in another. In the global village of today, however, where anti-Semitism metastasizes instantly in media shared around the world, it is only a matter of time until no one will want us, no one but Israel, that is: But Israel against the world? The entire world? Will Israel (God forbid) be our Jewish Alamo?

The “Anti-Semitism is endemic” story runs counter to scientific argument. “Endemic” throughout time, place, and culture, assumes some kind of genetic carrier, an anti-Semite gene, perhaps. However commonplace anti-Semitism may be, must we say it is endemic? Necessary? Always and everywhere? A kind of metaphysical reality inherent in humanity itself?

To be sure, Christian culture dedicated centuries to distilling hatred of Jews within the western cultural heritage. But since the 1960s, official Christian teaching has repudiated its anti-Semitic past. Islamic views provide less reason for optimism. In a 2013 study, for example, 64% of Austrian Muslims agreed that “Jews cannot be trusted.”^[ii] But our conclusions require nuance. In 2010, 25% of Muslim high-school students in Germany who were of Arab background agreed that “It is the Jews who drive the world to disaster.” Only 2.8% of those without any migrant background concurred.^[iii] In most studies, fundamentalist Muslims are more likely to be anti-Semites; and males are more anti-Semitic than females. Does the metaphysical anti-Semitic pathogen inhabit men more than women? Or is it more likely that Muslims (overwhelmingly male) who study in fundamentalist schools pick up a cultural attitude the way believing Christians did in medieval Europe?

I don’t minimize anti-Semitism in the world. But we are fools to consider it a pathogenic human cell that is somehow carried genetically and beyond our ability to erase.

I prefer Story #2, the theory that cultures respond to crises by fastening blame on scapegoated outsiders. Modi’s India and Sri Lanka’s Buddhists fixate on Muslims; Orban’s Hungary resurrects the Jewish threat; as do American extremists on both left and right, who simultaneously blame each other as well. 

If the cause of anti-Semitism is crises, the proper study of it should identify the crises that bring it into being, and in our case, it is a worldwide crisis of fear, of imagined scarcity, of a dystopian apocalypse about to strike.

In recent memory, we have suffered 1. a global shutdown from a plague called covid; 2. mounting climate change that could erase life as we know it, and that meanwhile brings floods, fires, and storms of increasing ferocity; 3. an economy where everyone but the super rich feels poorer; 4. uncontrolled migrations from failed states; 5. enhanced computerization that takes away jobs; 6. the multiplication of terrorists, dictators, and now war: first in Ukraine; then in Israel and Gaza. And the brutality of it all is broadcast around the clock and in real time across mass media that feast on horror. 

The war in Gaza provides a convenient outlet for people’s fears, for there is plenty of blame to spread around. Would Hamas have attacked no matter what? Yes. Is the Palestinian Authority corrupt and weakened to the point where dialogue partners are hard to find? Again, yes. But are the policies of the Netanyahu government also to blame? For sure. We properly stand with Israel but should not be surprised at heated critiques from those who sympathize with images of civilian suffering in Gaza. These critics are not all anti-Semites, although some are. 

In any event, whether they know it or not, they are part and parcel of a world of scarcity and fear, where you are either for us or against us. John Gray, a scholar specializing in Thomas Hobbes, fears an all-out “war of all against all between self-defined collective identities… an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language” where “enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed.”^[iv]

Will it come to that? 

Anti-Semitism is real, but if we paint ourselves into our own corner as necessary victims of an imagined anti-Semitic pathogen, and needing, therefore, to join this war of all against all, we may unwittingly help bring the worst to pass ourselves. We do have enemies, but we also have allies, chief among them the current president of the United States and the majority of politicians in both parties, despite the outliers on the extremes of left and right. We need to enlist our allies, not give up on them all just because some of them turned out to be turncoats; and together to fight anti-Semitism, not give up on it.

The easy approach is to imagine an inherent anti-Semitic pathogen, worse even than the Bubonic Plague, because the plague is carried by rats, while anti-Semitism is carried in the human genetic makeup. I hate to quote acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), who himself said some nasty things about Jews,^[v] but Mencken’s most famous adage applies here. “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Hatred of Jews is such a complex problem. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

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^[i] Reported, for example, in Time (October 14, 2023), See https://time.com/6323730/hamas-attack-left-response/

^[ii] https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jikeli_Antisemitic_Attitudes_among_Muslims_in_Europe1.pdf, p.7. Cf. Gunther Jikeli, European Muslim Anti-Semitism: Why Young Urban Males Say They Don’t Like Jews  ((Indiana University Press, 2015).

^[iii] Jikeli, Anti-Semitic Attitudes … In Europe, p. 17.

^[iv] John Gray, The New Leviathans (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2023), p. 5.

^[v] Robert Kanigel, “Did H.L. Mencken Hate the Jews?,” Menckeniana 73 (Spring 1980), pp. 1-7.            

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.   

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^[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.