A world without love by Peter and Gordon
Please lock me away
And don't allow the day
Here inside where I hide
With my loneliness

I don't care what they say
I won't stay in a world without love

There was once a man whose adolescent son had fallen into sinful ways. The boy would stay out late at night, carouse with Gentiles, and chase after girls. He even spoke to his mother and father with disrespect. Finally, at a complete loss as to how he might lead his son back to the proper path, the father went to speak to the Baal Shem Tov.

“Rebbe,” he said, “I am at my wits’ end. My son has fallen into such evil that I fear for his soul. He has completely abandoned the teachings of our faith, and his behavior is disgraceful. I have threatened to beat him or to throw him out of the house, but nothing seems to work. How can I convince him to change his ways?”

The Baal Shem Tov replied: “Love him more.”

“But he deserves no love!” the father answered.

“That is all the more reason to increase your love for him,” the Besht insisted. “Do you think God loves us because we deserve it? No. Love is the very essence of life. It is the light that illuminates the path to God. If you would have your son follow that path, then you must be such a light unto him. Love him more.”

In the Talmud, Rabbi Simlai declares: The Torah begins with an act of lovingkindness and the Torah ends with an act of lovingkindness.” In the Book of Genesis when Adam and Eve are naked, God clothes them.  At the end of Torah when Moses dies, God buries him. A midrash adds that the middle of the Torah also includes acts of lovingkindness. When Abraham is in need of healing after his circumcision, God visits him.[1]

Judaism is about love. If that sounds strange to you, I get it.  How often do we hear that Christianity is about love but Judaism is about….. well it’s about….something else …. like law or justice, or whatever.  In the past Christian anti-Judaism was about the supersession of a loveless Judaism by a loving Christianity.[2] 

American Jews long ago began to define Judaism as whatever they thought Christianity was not, perhaps out of their anxiety about assimilation. Since Christianity was about love, Judaism wasn’t. Since Christianity places an emphasis on feeling, Judaism was more about action and ritual. Since Christians were so focused on belief, Judaism played down faith. Because Christianity stresses divine grace, many Jews believed that Judaism doesn’t have a notion of grace.

In actuality, grace, in Hebrew chesed, is foundational to Jewish theology and spirituality. The gift of life, God’s love and the gift of Torah, is grace -- not something we have earned but a gift.

In the same vein, we often hear that whereas the God of the New Testament is a God of love and mercy and grace, the God of what Christians refer to as the Old Testament, is an angry, vindictive and bloodthirsty God.[3]  

The truth is Judaism is a religion of love and law, of action and emotion. In fact, Jewish liturgy reminds us every day, dare I say multiple times a day that Jewish law itself is a manifestation of divine love.[4] Twice a day we recite the Shema in which we declare God’s love for us and then we recite words that come right out of the Book of Deuteronomy:

וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔ אֵ֖ת יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ֥ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשְׁךָ֖ וּבְכׇל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ׃
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your might (Deut. 6:5)

Judaism is built on the idea that God loves us. It’s a reciprocal love. We see that in the blessing that appears just before we recite the Shma:

ברוך אתה ה' הבוחר בעמו ישראל באהבה
 Blessed are You Adonai our God, who lovingly cares for the people Israel.

Rabbi Akiva said: Even more beloved is the human being, for it was made known to him that he was created in the image of God. In other words, God didn’t just create us in God’s image but God let us know that God did that.[5] Some Jewish thinkers go further. When you love someone, said Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, you don’t tell them unless you want to be in a relationship with them. That is God’s hope – that God’s love for us will be reciprocated by us.  That’s what we recite in the Shema – we attest to God’s vast love for us, and then take upon ourselves the charge to reciprocate that love.[6]

Many of us struggle with ambivalence and uncertainty about ourselves, about our worth and lovability. God is not ambivalent. God loves us more than we love ourselves.[7]
Despite the fact that God loves all of us, it doesn’t mean we are all the same. In one Mishnah we read: Adam was created singly to proclaim the greatness of the Blessed Holy One, for a human being stamps many coins with one die and they are all alike one with the other.  But the King of Kings, the Blessed Holy One, has stamped all of humanity with the die of the first man, and yet not one of them is like his fellow.[8]

The message here is that there has never been and never will be in the history of the cosmos another human being just like you. And that simple fact testifies to the glory of God. We are all valuable and we are all distinctly unique. That is why each of us matters.

It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha-olam—“for my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’efer”—“I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.

While these two statements might seem like a contradiction, Jewish tradition tells us that knowing we matter is not pride. Pride would be the insistence that we have earned all of the worth we have, or the pretension that we matter while others do not. Knowing our worth is not vanity. Vanity would be the insistence that our worth is something we ourselves have achieved.  Similarly, knowing our talents and abilities is not arrogance but self-awareness.[9]

Being humble does not mean feeling incompetent or inferior to others. Humility has nothing at all in common with self-hatred or self-loathing. To see ourselves as worthless, is to grant ourselves license to behave in vulgar and abject ways. As Maimonides said: If one has a base view of oneself, one will readily do base things.”[10]. As the Hasidic master Rabbi Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin once said: Just as a person believes in God, one must also believe in oneself.”[11]

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, a 20th century teacher of Mussar, a movement focusing on virtue-based ethics and personal transformation, wrote that to be conscious only of our shortcomings is a prescription for failure and despondency.  Woe to a person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.[12] Whether we think too much of ourselves or too little, we all too frequently end up thinking only of ourselves. As the 12 Step slogan goes: Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself. It means thinking of yourself less. Just as no human being can confer God’s love upon us, so also can no human being take it away.[13]

This afternoon we will talk about the story of Jonah. The assumption we often make is that Jonah is read on Yom Kippur because it is a story about the power of repentance. Threatened with obliteration for their sins, the people of Nineveh heed Jonah’s warning: they repent and change their ways.

But another reason we read Jonah is because he is an ambivalent prophet; a man called by God, given a mission and he refuses to do it. It is only reluctantly, kicking and screaming that he finally responds to the summons to fulfill God’s word. In a way we are all Jonah. Each of us has things often deeply consequential things, we’re called upon to do that we’d simply rather not. So, like Jonah we run away from our calling.  On Yom Kippur we acknowledge that painful reality, both to God and to ourselves, and stand ready to respond to God’s call.[14]

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote: to be created in the image of God is to be assigned a specific task by God. Rabbi Soloveitchik believed that each of us is given a distinctive mission and the moment into which we are born is reflective of the assignment God has in mind for us.[15]

In some sense Rabbi Soloveitchik adds, we are not free to accept or decline our mission. We are sometimes called to a task that is overwhelming or exhausting or that seems like a fool’s errand, and yet we are not free to walk away.  This was a hard lesson for Jonah to learn. We read this story in part because it is also our story. We read this story on Yom Kippur to remind ourselves that although we have the ability to turn away, religiously (Jewishly) speaking we don’t have the right to do so.

Jewish tradition makes a simple but audacious claim: despite our conflicting impulses, we remain capable of choosing the good – and the height of good is love.  Judaism is not naïve about who and what we are, so it isn’t that we will choose the good, but rather we can choose the good.[16]  

God loves us but God’s love is mediated and experienced, at least initially, through the love shown to us by human caregivers. We need parents and caregivers to bolster our sense of dignity and self-worth.[17]  Our parents’ love is something that helps us create who we are. Ideally, they teach us how to love, how to mourn loss, how to form real and enduring relationships; how to live peacefully with others; and how to learn and grow from our experiences.[18]

Having said this I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that many of us did not experience anything like that growing up. While love and nurturing builds us up, neglect and abuse tear us down. If good care can help us mature into loving people, poor, indifferent, or abusive care can damage or stunt us in countless ways.[19] As philosopher Natalia Marandiuc writes: “It is not the case that the human self gives rise to love, but rather that the love that comes from others gives rise to the self.”

If we look at the Torah a little bit closer, we will see that it isn’t just about God’s love or individual love. We are commanded to love our neighbor and the stranger as well[20]. The Hebrew word ger is translated as “stranger” “sojourner” “alien” or “foreigner. In the Torah this word ger refers to a non-Israelite resident of the land who has no family or clan to look after him, and who is therefore vulnerable to social and economic exploitation.”[21] We have a name for folks like that today-- immigrants. It may be hard enough to love a member of our own community, but we are asked to do more; to love the stranger like a neighbor.

When it comes to loving our neighbor, the Torah is not unique. All over the ancient Near East evidence has been found of concern for the widow, the orphan and the impoverished. It is rare however, to find the stranger included in such lists outside of the Torah.[22]

In Exodus we read: You shall not oppress a stranger for you know the feeling of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.[23] The Torah’s charge is based on empathy. Since you know what it feels like to be a stranger, you must never abuse a stranger.

Exodus teaches the baseline requirement: not to oppress the stranger, while Leviticus magnifies the demand. Not only must we not oppress the stranger, we must actively love him:[24]

When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him.”  The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your native-born; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.”[25]  
It’s one thing to not oppress the foreigners living among us. It’s quite another to actively love them.[26]

In any case, the Torah could easily have responded differently to the experience of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt. Instead of learning the lesson of how to treat the stranger, the Torah could have instructed the Israelites that the lesson to learn is-- since you were treated so horribly you don’t owe anyone anything.[27]

Instead, the Torah teaches us that demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants and foreigners is an abomination. We are told the highest achievement of which we are capable is to live with compassion. This is considered nothing less than walking in God’s own ways.

I started this sermon by singing an excerpt from the classic tune by Peter and Gordon, A World Without Love, written by Paul McCartney and released in 1964. There are hundreds or more likely thousands of songs about love. Many of those songs are about romantic love. What struck me about this song was the title, A World Without Love. Although this song is about romantic love, as I read and listen to the news, I can’t help but think that those who are attempting to create a world without love, don’t just hate others, they hate themselves.

Love is a choice we make in a world that is inundated with both beauty and barbarism. On any given day we may dance with joy and recoil in horror.  We see signs of moral progress in one corner and symptoms of decay in another.  We see some who revel in killing innocent people and others who risk life and limb to save perfect strangers.[28]

Creating a world with love is a challenge but if we know we are created with love, for love; that we are always already loved; that we don’t earn God’s love but rather strive to live up to that love, we can achieve love. To be human is to grow in love, love for friends, family and community; love for humanity, especially the vulnerable and downtrodden; and ultimately love for all creation. In short, we need each other.[29]

The kind of world we inhabit depends to a great extent on the choices we and others
make.  To paraphrase the Torah: Choose life, but more importantly, choose love.

So, I wait and in a while
I will see my true love smile
She may come, I know not when
When she does, I'll know, so baby, until then
 
Lock me away
And don't allow the day
Here inside where I hide
With my loneliness

I don't care what they say
I won't stay in a world without love




[1] Shai Held. Judaism is About Love (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, c2024) 225

[2] Ibid. 4

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid. 23

[6] Ibid. 24

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid. 25

[9] Ibid. 32

[10] Commentary to Mishnah Avot 2:18

[11] Ibid. 33

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid. 34

[14] Ibid. 35

[15] Ibid. 36

[16] Ibid. 7

[17] Ibid. 79

[18] Ibid. 94

[19] Ibid

[20] Lev. 19:34; Deut. 10:19

[21] Ibid. 180

[22] Ibid. 181

[23] Ex. 23:9

[24] Ibid. 181

[25] Lev. 19:33-34

[26] Ibid. 181

[27] Ibid. 189

[28] Ibid. 6

[29] Ibid. 379-380

Jerusalem of Gold by Naomi Shemer
Avir harim tzalul kayayin
Vereiach oranim,
Nisa beru'ach ha'arbayim
Im kol pa'amonim.

Uvetardemat ilan va'even
Shvuyah bachalomah,
Ha'ir asher badad yoshevet
Uvelibah chomah.

Chorus:
Yerushalayim shel zahav
Veshel nechoshet veshel or
Halo lechol shirayich ani kinor. (x2)

The song I just sang Jerusalem of Gold, was written by Naomi Shemer and sung by Shuli Natan at the Israeli Music Festival on May 15, 1967, shortly before the Six Day War. Only 3 weeks later, the Israel Defense Forces captured the eastern part of Jerusalem and the Old City from the Jordanians.  

The words of the song describe:
The mountain air is clear as wine and the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight with the sound of bells.

And in the slumber of tree and stone captive in her dream
The city that sits solitary and in its midst is a wall.
Jerusalem of gold and of copper, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

One of my early memories as a child is of a phone call my mother made to Israel during the Six-day war. She was trying to reach her sister -- trying to reach her because back then you didn’t just dial the number and automatically reach your party. It was a bit more complicated. To make an international call, one first had to dial zero to get an operator who would then help you. You could also ask to speak to an overseas operator and then give that person the number you were calling.

While I don’t remember exactly what happened, my recollection is that a few hours later, the operator called back and let my mother know the call went through and she could now talk with her sister.

Whatever the actual chain of events that resulted in my mother speaking with her sister Rachel were she made the call because one; she wanted to make sure my aunt and her family were ok; and two, she wanted to ask my aunt to put her two children David and Michal on a plane – to come and stay with us in the United States till the war was over. In a typical Israeli response, my aunt said no.  Her children would stay in Israel.

While it was hard to get news from Israel in a timely manner in 1967, by 1991 and the start of the Gulf War, much had changed.  CNN was the first network to broadcast a war.  It was the first real war that had live satellite coverage and the first-time viewers could watch a war unfold live.[1]

So, when a scud missile landed on the block near where my Aunt Rachel and Uncle Tzvi lived in Tel Aviv, their son David -that same David now living in the United States- watched it land, recognized where it landed and called to check on his parents.  It was all pretty much instantaneous.

Today, not only can we reach folks in Israel in an instant, we now have multiple ways in which to contact our family and friends there—by phone, text, email, and apps on our phones like Whatsapp.  

There was a lot of that going when on Oct. 7th 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups infiltrated 22 Israeli towns and army bases, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages. The militants crossed into Israel by land, sea and air and the attack included breaching the border fence, disabling radar and communications towers, firing thousands of rockets toward cities as far away as Jerusalem and seizing military bases. More than three dozen Thai guest workers were killed and hundreds of civilians, homes, and buildings were burned.[2]

As we approach the first anniversary of these horrific events, I want to take a step back.  I want to take a closer look at some of the disinformation that has been out there, most of it before October 7th, but which has been broadcast much more loudly and frequently since October 7th. 

We’ll start with Zionism.    

Zionism is the Jewish movement for self-determination in the Land of Israel. It is the ancient longing of the Jewish people to return to their, to our ancestral homeland. That longing has been a constant theme for the past 2500 years[3] perhaps most famously conveyed by Yehuda HaLevi, the 12th century Rabbi, poet, and philosopher who lived in Muslim Spain.

My heart is in the east and I am at the edge of the west. Then how can I taste what I eat, how can I enjoy it? How can I fulfill my vows and pledges while Zion is in the domain of Edom? And I am in the bonds of Arabia.

Going back even earlier to the Tanakh, Zion is the name of a hill in Jerusalem as well as the name of the city itself. It is also the name of a Jebusite fortress that King David captured in the 10th century BCE. The term Zion also shows up in one of the more well-known of the psalms, 137: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion. When a Jew dies, mourners are comforted with the words “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” 

Few terms however, are more loaded, misunderstood, or abused than Zionism. Depending on how you use it, the word has become a kind of political litmus test: a badge of pride or an insult. And how you use it, or if you use it at all, tends to indicate how you feel about Israel.[4]  

In her book Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse frames it this way. Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews’ safety.

This term Zionism has always been a bit controversial, but the tone of the conversation about Zionism took a sharp turn in 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism. Resolution 3379 went further than any other previous anti-Israel initiative.  Whereas prior UN resolutions had stated that racism should be eliminated, the new message was that if Zionism is a form of racism, then it and the state it created must also be stamped out.[5]

The resolution never defined Zionism nor did it explain how and why Zionism is a form of racism.  Of the thousands of independence and nationalist movements in the world, including Palestinian nationalism, only the Jewish movement has ever had a UN resolution condemning it. The resolution was repealed in 1991 but the damage was done. [6]

The modern-day Zionist movement picked up steam in the 1880s. Against a backdrop of violent pogroms and rising antisemitism, waves of Zionists; waves of Jews, immigrated to Palestine.[7]  Rural collective communities and urban communities were established in towns built on land purchased – legally purchased, from absentee Ottoman landlords.

Many early immigrants found life very difficult and returned home. But many others stayed, purchasing more land, negotiating with the Ottoman authorities and promoting immigration into the growing Jewish community.[8]  My great grandfather Avram Yitzhak made his way to Palestine in the early 1890’s and was one of those Zionists who stayed, although my understanding is it took him a few trips back and forth to his home Neshvitz in Belarus, before he permanently settled in Palestine. Avram Yitzhak was a member of the Bilu, which stands for Beit Ya'akov Lekhu Venelkhah, Let the House of Jacob Go.[9] Up until this time, Jews went to Israel for religious reasons and they mostly relied on the charitable contributions of Jewish organizations for their survival. The members of the Bilu, however believed that it was not only time for Jews to live in Israel, but to make their living there as well.  

Making a living meant farming and owning a piece of land. Despite what many protesters are yelling about Jews stealing land, that is not what happened. Land was purchased and those purchases took place in sparsely populated areas. As a matter of official Zionist policy, the Jews did not purchase land occupied by fellahin, or Arab farmers.  Only if a fellah left his place of settlement was there an offer to buy his land.[10]

Much of the land purchased was uncultivated, malaria-infested swamps, rocky, or sandy land. It’s a very well-known story about the Jews draining the swamps to rid their towns of malaria. My grandfather Eliezer was one of those responsible for bringing Eucalyptus trees from Australia to drain the swamps in his town of Hadera, where he grew up -- the town my great grandfather helped to found and where my great grandmother died of malaria.

Jewish organizations were willing to pay exorbitant prices. For example, rich black soil in Iowa sold for $110/acre while Jews paid $1,000/acre for arid and semi-arid land in Palestine.[11]   

By 1947, Jews owned 463,000 acres of land in Palestine. Some of that land was purchased from the government, some from churches, and some from Arab landowners. Far from being built on stolen land, Israel is the only state built partly on purchased land.  The rest of the land that became part of Israel came from public lands previously part of the Ottoman Empire.[12]  

Well, some might argue, if the Jews legally bought land, they didn’t legally settle on the land. They were settler colonialists. This is another of the chants heard in protests this past year that Israel is a “settler colonial enterprise.”

Colonialism is when a country or empire imposes control and power over other peoples or territories by establishing colonies.  Settler colonialism is a specific type of colonialism in which foreign settlers aim to replace the Indigenous population. This “replacement” of the Indigenous population happens in a multitude of ways including genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

The Zionist movement in the 1880’s didn’t start as an attempt by an empire at colonial expansion. It was a voluntary movement by European Jews fleeing religious and political persecution.[13]

Jews are not settler colonialists because they are indigenous to the land of Israel and they never had the goal of eliminating the Arab population living in the region. They accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which divided British Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Historian Barbara Tuchman once described Israel as “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”[14]
In addition, while European settler colonialists settled colonies to enrich their motherlands, and maintained a connection to their home countries to which they could return if they so wished, Jews who came to Palestine had no motherland in Europe to enrich.[15]  

Then there is that word Palestine. A popular meme on social media that has been making the rounds since last Xmas is that Jesus was a Palestinian. Although many Palestinians today are Christians, Jesus himself was not one.[16]  He was born to Jewish parents in a place called Judea, not Palestine. He lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew. In the time of Jesus, Palestine didn’t exist. In the second century, Judea, which was the epicenter of large-scale Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, was renamed Syria Palaestina—later simply Palaestina—by the Romans a full century after the death of Jesus.

The assertion that Jesus was Palestinian is often made in an effort to negate Jewish history, to insist that only Palestinians, and not Jews, have a claim to the land.[17] This absolutist claim provides a seedbed for the radical belief that Jews do not deserve a country of their own in even a part of their ancestral homeland.

Jesus may not have been a Palestinian Jew, but you know who was – my mother. As her passport affirmed, Aliza Blumrosen was born in Palestine, before the establishment of the state of Israel.

As author Dara Horn writes: The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.[18]

While Dara Horn’s words ring true, I would like to end with a more hopeful message – a message written by the former chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory:

To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet but could be.

We have returned to the cisterns, to the market and to the market-place
A ram's horn calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountains thousands of suns shine -
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea, by way of Jericho!
Chorus:
Yerushalayim shel zahav
Veshel nechoshet veshel or
Halo lechol shirayich ani kinor.
x2

L’shana tova tikatayvu, May you be inscribed for a good year and thank you to Dr. Bill Liss-Levinson for these words -- “May we all find the inner and communal strength to meaningfully fulfill our roles and responsibilities, bringing more Torah, love, peace, compassion, justice and understanding into the world.”  


[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/01/politics/wolf-blitzer-gulf-war-iraq-kuwait-cnn/index.html
 

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-attack.html
 

[3] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/zionism-what-the-heck-is-it
 

[4] Daniel Sokatch. Can We Talk About Israel? (Bloomsbury, 2021) 35

[5] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/is-zionism-white-supremacy

[6] Ibid

[7] Daniel Sokatch. Can We Talk About Israel? (Bloomsbury, 2021) 40

[8] Ibid. 41

[9] Isaiah 2:5

[10] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/19th-century-immigration-to-the-land-of-israel
 

[11] https://www.israelanswers.com/blog/was-israel-founded-stolen-land
 

[12] https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-myth-of-no-peace-on-stolen-land
 

[13] https://www.jta.org/2024/08/25/ideas/a-literary-critic-on-why-the-settler-colonial-framing-is-deadly-for-israel-and-palestine

[14] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/jewish-history-jesus-settler-colonialism-claims/677149/

[15] https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/settler-colonialist
 

[16] Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians - The Atlantic

[17] Ibid

[18] The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning - The Atlantic

Spirit in the Sky (Norman Greenbaum)
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best
When I lay me down to die
Goin' up to the spirit in the sky
Goin' up to the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky)
That's where I'm gonna go when I die (when I die)
When I die and they lay me to rest
I'm gonna go to the place that's best

A wealthy chassid once boasted to his Rebbe that he has a separate house where he resides only on Passover, and no chametz ever enters the house. In this way he is absolutely certain that he is in complete compliance with the Torah requirement to be free of all chametz on Passover.

The Rebbe however, was not at all impressed. “What you are doing is actually contrary to the wishes of the Torah. The point is precisely to have chametz all year round, and to dispose of it on Passover. Not having the need to search after chametz and clean the house thoroughly defeats the purpose.”[1]  

In this story chametz is a symbol representing the yetzer hara, the evil inclination; the drive to gratify our physical impulses.  Instead of battling his yetzer hara, and overcoming his desire to have chametz on Passover by removing it from his house, the man just moves into his other house that is already free of chametz.

In rabbinic thought every human being has two inclinations or instincts, one pulling upwards, the other pulling downwards—the good inclination or yetzer ha tov, and the evil inclination, the yetzer hara.

Judaism says that everything God creates is good including the yetzer hara. What draws us to the evil inclination is our impulse to self-alienate. When we separate ourself from others, the world and even ourself, we are more likely to be drawn to do bad things.  The following parable is a good example:

Once two men were traveling together on a boat….One man casually took out a hand drill and began to drill a hole under his seat. The other man was startled and asked him: “What are you doing? Don’t you know that you’re going to sink the boat?” The first man simply replied, “What, I’m not drilling on your side. What’s the big deal? It’s not my problem.”

The man drilling is incapable of seeing how his actions are affecting someone else – someone sitting right beside him. This blindness to the interests of anyone or anything else around ourself, and even to our own greater self-interests beyond the moment, is the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, because it usually results in negative outcomes.

So, how is this evil inclination that we all have, not so bad? Well, sometimes in order to achieve a goal we have to be pretty focused on ourself and driven by our own needs. The rabbis would say: If not for the yetzer hara, no one would build a house, marry, have children, or engage in a trade.[2]  

The point is to not repress the yetzer hara in each of us, but to suppress it.  We should be aware of those thoughts and feelings, and then control them so that they do not run amok and become part of our character.  As Judaism teaches, we either become our mind’s master and the master of our evil inclinations, or it masters us.[3] In Pirket Avot, Ben Zoma asks: Who is mighty? One who controls his evil inclination.[4]    

Having a yetzer hara is part of being human but we all must work diligently to rid ourselves of it. Not to have chametz i.e. a yetzer hara, is to be an angel and we are asked to be holy humans not angels.[5]  This is in part what makes us different from animals.

Humans unlike animals, have the capacity through self-reflection, to improve themselves.[6] In teaching Bali the place command which he did very well until recently – but that’s another story -- Bali has certainly improved himself. But it wasn’t his choice. It was mine. He may do it to make me happy but he didn’t do it to improve himself. 

Humans also have the capacity to think about the goal and purpose of their existence.  While it’s true that not all humans take the opportunity to reflect on the purpose of their existence, they have the ability to do so.  Animals do not.

Humans can also reflect on the consequences of their actions and have the capacity to control their anger.[7]   Yeah, I know, that’s a hard one to swallow, but what I said was we have the capacity to control our anger. I didn’t say we always succeed at it, because we don’t. Humans also have the capacity to forgive.[8] Again, we have the capacity but do we forgive?

A human being has the ability to choose between right and wrong. A human being has the ability to be charitable, to sacrifice of him and herself and of their belongings to help other humans, even strangers. A human being has the ability to be compassionate.[9]  

If you think about it, human beings may be the only living creatures that are truly free.[10] Even animals in the wild are not truly free because they are controlled by their bodies and can’t make a free choice. If an animal is hungry, it must search for food. An animal can’t one day decide to fast as many of us have chosen to do over the next 24 hours—although Bali seems to occasionally make that choice.  The ability to defy a bodily desire is unique to humans.  It is only fear of retribution that will keep an animal from fulfilling a bodily drive. If a jackal is foraging for food and spies a carcass being feasted on by a huge tiger, it will stay away for fear the tiger will eat him as well.

If you take all the traits unique to man and group them together, the sum total of these are what can be referred to as the spirit. Those who put these capacities to use can be called spiritual people. Those who put these capacities to use set aside their personal will and adopt the Divine will.  Again, this is something beyond the reach of any living thing other than man.[11]  

Much of what I have just described comes from the writings of Rabbi Abraham Twerski of blessed memory. Rabbi Twerski was an Orthodox rabbi, the descendant of several Hasidic dynasties. He was also a psychiatrist and a respected authority on addiction who was drawn to the 12-step approach central to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Rabbi Twerski believed spirituality was not so easy to define, but a starting point might be to explain what spirituality is not. Spirituality is not withdrawing from society and isolating oneself as a recluse, eating the bare minimum to remain alive and sleeping on the ground, spending the entire day in prayer and meditation.

So, what is Rabbi Twerski’s definition of spirituality? -- becoming the best person you can be by thinking about a purpose in life—by thinking about how you can improve yourself and become a better person. 

Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their book The Spirituality of Imperfection describe it this way:  Truth, wisdom, goodness, beauty, the fragrance of a rose – all resemble spirituality in that they are intangible, ineffable realities. We may know them we but can never grasp them with our hands or with our words. [12] Like love, spirituality is a way that we “be.”
Spirituality is also a paradox in that what underlies it is the sense of incompleteness. To be human is to be incomplete, yet yearn for completion; to be uncertain but long for certainty; to be imperfect yet long for perfection; to be broken yet crave for wholeness.[13]

The Lizensker Rebbe, Yosef Meier Mayer, who passed away a few years ago, once said: Only God is perfect. Man’s actions must be basically defective in part. If one believes his good deed or holy study to be thoroughly pure and perfect, this is a sure sign that they are thoroughly bad.[14]

Some describe the difference between religion and spirituality this way. Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.[15]
Rabbi Twerski described spiritual growth as being different from physical growth in that it never comes to completion and it can sometimes feel like you have regressed rather than progressed.[16] One of my favorite parables describes this regression very well.  

The parable states: “The closer you get to the light the more obstacles there are.”  The analogy provided to demonstrate this parable is an army attacking a castle.  Successful in their battle to get closer and closer to that castle, once the army was virtually on its doorstep, well—that was the moment when the enemy poured boiling oil down on them in order to deter their entry.  That isn’t to say the army didn’t eventually conquer the castle, but in order to accomplish that task they needed to be vigilant in their efforts.

As I mentioned above, spiritual people set aside their personal will and adopt the Divine will.  This concept, this belief, is the cornerstone of the 12-Steps. For instance, Step 2 states: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

As Jews we may find this statement uncomfortable. We may hear it as being saved by something or someone outside of ourselves. We may hear it as salvation in a Christian sense, with someone redeeming us. But, Step 2 says “could restore us” not will restore us. Moving from potential to actual depends on us. Moving towards sanity you simply have to take one step that moves you outside the trap of yourself, of total self-involvement.[17]  

The 12-Step program requires the surrender of one’s will and accepting the will of God—or more generally a higher power. It requires searching out one’s character defects and correcting them. It requires making amends to those we may have offended. It requires helping others. It requires rigorous honesty. It provides a method whereby a person can become truly spiritual.[18]   

Without spirituality a human being is motivated and driven by all the animalistic emotions for maximum comfort and pleasure—the goal being self-gratification. [19]

If you are of the belief that the 12-Steps are Christian, please understand there is nothing more Jewish than the 12-Steps.  As Rabbi Twerski has written: The twelve-step program appeared to have its roots in the Oxford Group [a Christian organization], but I have quipped that if Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, were alive today, I would have him sued for plagiarism, because everything in the twelve-step program seems to have been taken from the Talmud and Mussar writings.[20]  Mussar, dating back to the medieval period, is a Jewish spiritual practice focusing on virtue-based ethics and personal transformation.  

Judaism is a spiritual approach to being a human being in the world, but Judaism does not close itself off to outside disciplines of knowledge and wisdom. In Pirkei Avot the Ethics of the Fathers, the same rabbi Ben Zoma, who asked: Who is mighty, also asked: Who is wise? One who learns from all men.[21]

One of the lessons we can learn from Judaism and spirituality is that Judaism makes room for doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. That would be complacency or hubris, acting as if we have it all figured out. The opposite of faith therefore is not having the courage to remain open-minded and to continually ask life’s most important questions.

Judaism also leaves room for us to cultivate our own relationship with God. Truthfully, there is no one Jewish way to believe in God.  The only real dogmas in Judaism are that God can never be a human being and that there is one God alone.  We are still responsible for doing our own spiritual digging, by learning and reflecting on our own experiences as they relate to spiritual ideas and practices.

One of the key words of this High Holy Day season is Teshuvah, repentance. The word comes from the verb root meaning “to return.” It is the process by which spiritual transformation or change happens.  Change can occur in our character, in our behavior. We can’t change what was done but we change the present. If we can come clean, then the past becomes a stepping stone to success, rather than ending in failure. 

The truth is if we are unable to change and our character is hopelessly trapped by its early development and past deeds, what point would there be to the future? As the Chassidic master Reb Nachman of Bratslav once noted: If we are not better tomorrow than we are today, then why have tomorrow?[22]

Teshuvah is an action not a thought or feeling.  We can certainly think we’d like to change or be sorry for what we’ve done in the past, but until we actually do something about it, we have not done teshuvah.

Step 4 of the 12-Steps mirrors this process of teshuvah. In Step 4 we take a moral inventory of ourself, looking at people, institutions, systems and even ideas we resent. Cheshbon ha nefesh an accounting of the soul, is a very Jewish concept. This is the way Judaism views the Step Four inventory. The entire month of Elul just before Rosh Hashanah is devoted to a piercing moral scrutiny.[23] 

The philosopher Martin Buber once said: “You cannot find redemption until you see the flaws in your own soul…. whoever shuts out the realization of his flaws is shutting out redemption. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves. Facing who we are and who we have become is the most difficult task of recovery and spiritual renewal. But it is also a turning point. It puts us in the direction we are going-- home to ourselves and a loving God.”[24]  

Recognizing the magnitude of Teshuvah, the Talmud stands in awe of those who sincerely go through its process, declaring: “Even the most righteous among us cannot stand in the place where one who has done Teshuvah stands. [25]

In his parting words to the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses says: This instruction (the Torah) which I enjoin you this day is not too baffling, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens….No, the thing is very close to you in your mouth and in your heart…..[26]

Throughout these last chapters of the Torah, Moses uses the phrase היום today, this day, over and over again.[27]  Moses is telling the Israelites to focus on today, not yesterday or tomorrow.  All of us can face the challenges of just one day. It’s only when we add the burdens of yesterday and tomorrow that we break down.  Right now, those burdens of yesterday and particularly tomorrow are as difficult as they have ever been to ignore. But, in the words of another 12-step slogan, Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift.   That’s how we live spiritually – one day at a time.

Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky)
That's where I'm gonna go when I die (when I die)
When I die and they lay me to rest
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best
Go to the place that's the best

G’mar Chatimah Tova


[1] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998), 11.

[2] Genesis Rabbah 9:7

[3] Paul Steinberg, Recovery, the 12 Steps and Jewish Spirituality (Jewish Lights, 2014), 42

[4] Avot 4:1

[5] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998)

[6] Ibid. 14

[7] Ibid. 15

[8] Ibid.

[9] Abraham Twerski, Teshuvah Through Recovery (Mekor Press, c2016) 58

[10] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998) 15-16

[11] Ibid. 77

[12] Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection (Bantam Books, 1992), 15
 
 

[13] Ibid, 19

[14] Ibid.

[15] A well-known 12-Step slogan

[16] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998) 195

[17] Kerry M. Olitzky and Stuart A. Copans, Twelve Jewish Steps to Recovery (Jewish Lights, 2009) 9-10

[18] Abraham Twerski, Teshuvah Through Recovery (Mekor Press, c2016), 60

[19] Ibid, 61

[20] Ibid, 86

[21] Pirkei Avot 4:1

[22] Paul Steinberg, Recovery, the 12 Steps and Jewish Spirituality (Jewish Lights, 2014) 82

[23] Kerry Olitzky, Recovery from Codependence, (Jewish Lights, c1993) 29             

[24] Ibid, 34

[25] BT Brachot 34b

[26] Deuteronomy 30:11-14

[27] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998),, 327