Images of Tashlich 5776

Congregation Adas Emuno held our annual Tashlich ceremony on Rosh Hashanah, following the conclusion of the afternoon children's and community service.

The service was held at New Overpeck Park in Leonia, one of Bergen County's largest park area. Rabbi Schwartz and Cantor Horowitz led the brief but beautiful ceremony, attended by several dozen congregants.

In keeping with tradition, Tashlich culminates with our throwing bread upon the water, to symbolize the casting out of sin.

It was a lovely day, perfect weather, and a truly moving spiritual experience was had by all!

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Yom Kippur 5776

THE WORK OF OUR HANDS

YOM KIPPUR 5776

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

In early July an 8-year-old boy from Baltimore named Zion Harvey became the world’s first recipient of a pediatric bilateral hand transplant. Zion was only 2 years old when he nearly died of a massive sepsis infection that forced the amputation of his hands and legs and compromised his kidneys. He received a kidney from his mother Pattie. In 2012 he visited Dr. Scott Kozin at Shriners Hospital of Philadelphia, who made the daring suggestion that rather than be fitted with a prosthesis Zion be considered for the double hand transplant. He underwent the daunting operation at nearby Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia under the direction of Dr. L. Scott Levin. Ten attending surgeons worked ten and a half hours, with a support staff of thirty. Today a team of physical and occupational therapists is teaching Zion to once again use his hands. Zion is one remarkable kid, with an irrepressible spirit and incandescent smile. If you haven’t seen his story on YouTube, watch it. You will cry.

Long before fingerprint ID, our ancestors realized that our hands are uniquely our own. They help define each and every person. The words of our millennia-old liturgy, words that we recited Rosh Hashanah morning and this morning, contain a striking phrase that you miss if you don’t know the Hebrew. In the U’netaneh Tokef—“Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die” section we read, “You open the book of our days, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.” The term for “signature” is hotem yad, literally the imprint of our hand: our palm print. In metaphorical language that recognized every person’s unique set of hands, the liturgy is suggesting that God remembers our every deed by examining the Book of Life that is the work of our hands, our own actions.

Three years ago an international team of scientists announced that some of the famous cave art from Spain and France was far older than previous thought. And it turned out that the oldest of the old, earlier than the stunning murals of bison and horses, was a simple red stencil hand print at El Castillo. Almost 40,000 years ago a Stone Age man or woman held up his or her hand and drew its outline, saying “this is me, I am here”.

Is it any different than your child saying, “Look Mommy, look Daddy. Look what I made,” and proudly holding up their hand print. What do you do? You hang it on the refrigerator, for everyone to see. Once caves were sacred space; now it’s the kitchen. How little has changed in forty thousand years.

Even before we speak we signal with our hands. The Talmud says that we enter the world with ours fists clenched and leave it with our hands open. Think about the implications of that one for a moment—there’s a whole sermon there… which I will give at another time.

As humankind advanced, our hand print evolved into our signature. The remarkable dexterity of the human hand, so crucial to primitive tool making, now enabled writing. Why is it that we still seek an autographed book or baseball? The signature on an object immediately personalizes and connects to people. That was the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln himself signed. That was the ball that Babe Ruth autographed. The signature differentiates that document or ball from every other one.

Leonard Nimoy died this past year. His Vulcan hand salute on Star Trek, “live long and prosper,” was known the world over. Most of you probably know (but just in case you don’t) that the salute was taken from the priestly benediction that Nimoy saw when attending synagogue as a boy. To this day in traditional synagogues the cohanim still raise their hands during this prayer and form a “Shin”, which stands for Shaddai, one of God’s names. It’s the same reason that a “Shin” is drawn on the outside of every mezuzah parchment. I wonder how many Trekkies realize they are signing a Hebrew letter and copying a synagogue ritual when they make the Vulcan salute?

True Trekkies will remember a poignant image from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Starship Enterprise had been gravely damaged. Scotty can’t do anything. There’s only one hope: someone must enter the radioactive nuclear chamber and manually repair the power source. It’s a suicide mission. To do so means certain death. Spock, that curious mixture of logic and compassion, goes in and locks the door. He saves the Enterprise. As he stands at the protective glass partition, already dying, mouthing his last words to his best friend Jim, he puts his hand against the glass in salute. Then Jim does the same, mirroring Spock’s hand. No further words are needed. It’s hand to hand; heart to heart.

By the way, if you visit some very traditional Jewish cemeteries you will occasionally see an engraved set of hands on the tombstone, held up much like Spock did. It’s highly unusual to see anything but Hebrew letters on Jewish tombs. But the sign of the hands was an exception reserved for cohanim.

The Bible is replete with images of hands: the right hand of might, the wicked hand, the bloodstained hand, the upraised hand of prayer.

Perhaps the most dramatic is the story of when Jacob conspires to steal the blessing of the firstborn of his brother Esau from his father Isaac. Jacob needs to impersonate his hairy brother before his blind father, so he wraps his hand in goatskin. When he meets his father, you can sense the shadow of doubt that passes over the aged patriarch at the moment of deception. “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau.” The hands win, and Jacob receives the blessing intended for Esau, and nothing is ever the same.

But there is another phrase from the Tanakh that I want to share, because it gets to the heart of what I want to say on this Yom Kippur. The Psalmist (115:7) speaks of the person “who has hands but does not touch.” Our hands have so many uses, but ultimately it is the simple power of the human touch that is most significant. I mean this physically and metaphorically.

When the liturgy says that God is looking for our imprint, consider that first and foremost we are being asked: have you reached out to another? Have you touched another’s life? Have you made a difference?

Family, friends, colleagues, clients, customers, casual acquaintances, even adversaries… the possibilities are all around, if we pursue them.

Have you taken their hand? Shaken their hand? Held their hand? Patted their back? Stroked their hair? Given them a hug?

“Who has hands but does not touch.” How awful to be invisible and untouched… and how much more so when you have the opportunity to touch and do not.

Audrey Hepburn, who I have never quoted before, said, “As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

A story is told of two God fearing people at the gates of heaven. God says to them: you both claim to be faithful servants. Now show me your hands. The two look at each other in surprise. The first puts out his hands; they are totally smooth. The second puts out his hands; they are full of scars. The Almighty ushers in the second, saying “well done”. The Almighty signals for the first to wait. “Why am I being detained?” he queries. God looks at his hands again, and then says, “Was there nothing worth fighting for? Was there nothing worth serving? You have lived a long life, and there are no scars?”

The folksinger Jewel has a beautiful song called “Hands”. In the last line she daringly suggests that “we are God’s hands”.

Would that we remember that as we go about our lives.

That remarkable little boy, Zion Harvey—he’s one of most articulate kids I’ve ever heard. He talked about how he managed to do so much without hands. He talked about what he wanted to do with hands. His goal is to one day swing on monkey bars. Toward the end of one interview he sensed a question that the interviewer did not explicitly ask: what would happen if the surgery does not go as planned, if the new hands do not take? He said, “And I’ll be fine if they mess up. Because I will still have my family.”

Zion Harvey touched thousands even before his new hands. I am sure he will touch thousands more.

Before I close… a personal note. I have wanted to give a sermon on hands for a long time. The reason is one some of you may suspect. My wife Debby is a hand rehabilitation therapist. These days she travels around the country and around the world teaching occupational and physical therapists the splinting of the hand. Before that she spent twenty years in the clinical setting. And part of that time she worked at Shriners Hospital in Philadelphia with Dr. Scott Kozin, the surgeon who first suggested Zion Harvery’s surgery and assisted with it.

So I knew this was time to give that sermon. And although I don’t usually dedicate sermons to individuals, this one is dedicated to Debby, my partner for the last 35 years.

The ancient Psalmist, the same one who spoke of hands that do not touch, concludes the 90th Psalm with a beautiful prayer, as I do now:

Vayehi noam Adonai Eloheinu aleinu; u’maseh yadeinu konena aleinu; u’maseh yadeinu konenainu.

May the favor of the Lord, our God, be upon us; let the work of our hands prosper; O prosper the work of our hands!

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Kol Nidre 5776

LEGACIES

EREV YOM KIPPUR 5776

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s iconic career records for home runs on August 7th, 2007. Do you know what happened to the ball? It was put up for sale on an on-line auction. On Sept. 15th of that year the fashion designer and billion dollar lifestyle company head Marc Ecko payed $752,467 for it.

Then Ecko, who, by the way, is Jewish and was born, raised, and lives here in New Jersey, did something quite interesting. He created a website to let fans decide what to do with the ball. He gave them three options to vote for: donating it to the Baseball Hall of Fame untouched, donating it to the Hall of Fame with an asterisk branded on its surface, or launching it into space forever.

Well, 19% favored chucking it into space, 34% preferred to see it donated to the Hall as is, and 47% voted to brand it before donating.

So, majority wins, that’s exactly what Ecko did. Home run ball #756 sits in Cooperstown with a permanent asterisk.

Some applauded the stunt; others decried it. Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins said, “Why brand it? It’s an accomplishment of 21, 22 years. It hasn’t been proven that Bonds used steroids. It’s a cruel world we live in.”

But fellow Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said, “I think time will sort out how you want to view it. The fans have a pretty good sense of what has gone on.”

Ecko himself said, in a bit of an understatement, that the poll results prove that fans believe Bond’s feat was “shrouded in a chapter of baseball history that wasn’t necessarily the clearest it could be.”

When I do a unit on integrity and cheating with my confirmation class, I have my students debate what should have been done with the ball. It makes for an interesting exercise. What intrigues me most is the issue of legacy. How should Bonds be remembered?

As a sports fan I find myself thinking about this question a lot, maybe more than I should, but there are so many provocative cases.

But before I share several of them, I must note that today marks the 50th anniversary of perhaps the greatest Jewish legacy sports event of all-time. Yes, it was on this Yom Kippur in 1965 that Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in the World Series.

As Koufax wrote in his autobiography: “There was never any decision to make, because there was never any possibility that I would pitch. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish religion. The club knows that I don’t work that day.”

The writer Zev Chafets reported twenty years later, while doing research for a book: “I was told by hundreds of Jewish men across the United States that their most important Jewish memory was of Sandy sitting out the Series.”

Rabbi Daniel Pernick wrote recently: “Two specific events produced more Jewish pride than anything else in the turbulent decade of the 1960s—Sandy Koufax’s refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur in 1965, and not quite two years later, the Six Day War in June 1967. To this day, the name Sandy Koufax is uttered with awe-both because of his athletic prowess and his courage to stand true to his values.”

Now to the flip side:

Lance Armstrong was once a hero of mine. I read his book and actually gave a sermon about why he was a genuine hero. All the good work he did in the fight against cancer—how does that measure up against the lying and deception we now know went on for years?

What will be the ultimate legacy of all those players who confessed to using performance enhancing drugs or did not confess but are strongly suspected of doing so?

What will be the ultimate legacy of athletes who came to great achievement legitimately, but then broke other rules, like Pete Rose?

What will be the ultimate legacy of athletes who came to great achievement legitimately, but then broke social mores, like Tiger Woods?

Or consider the cautionary tale of Joe Paterno. In the course of three months, three years ago, the legendary coach lost his job, his reputation and his life. The NCAA initially punished both him and his team not because they did anything wrong, but evidently because they did not do enough right—in taking stronger steps to stop Jerry Sandusky’s abusive behavior. They stripped Penn State of 111 victories. This past January they reversed themselves and restored the wins. Sports Illustrated wrote a piece about it entitles, “It’s Complicated” with the tag line, “Joe Pa got his wins back, and his statue may follow. But legacies aren’t so easily restored—or defined.”

Paterno himself said in 2011: “This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had done more.“

Respected sportswriter Tim Layden concluded his piece, “Stripping the victories was a punitive act with no connection to the crime. But the wins don’t exonerate Paterno. They add a thin layer atop an already complex legacy, comprised of the very good and the very bad.”

There’s that word again—legacy. And today, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is really about this—what do I want my legacy to be?

How can I make amends for the bad, and elevate the good?

How can I tip the scales of justice and compassion in my favor?

How I can I add a fresh chapter to the Book of Life that will be to my merit?

The most perplexing and problematic portion of our prayers… is also the most powerful and provocative. Why? Because it deals with our legacies.

It came earlier in our service and its worth delving a little deeper. When we started the U’netaneh Tokef section we said, “On Rosh Hashanah we reflect, and on Yom Kippur we consider: Who shall live for the sake of others; who, dying, shall leave a heritage of life.”

The traditional “Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die” prayers mince no words. “You write and You seal, You record and recount. You open the book of our days.” But then later, “and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.” God may inscribe the Book of Life, but we generate the content. We sign off, as it were, on what is written. Our tradition argues that there is a Judge and there is judgement. But it also makes clear that we supply the facts—the evidence.

And there is more: the liturgy continues, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who shall live and who shall die… who shall be secure and who shall be driven… who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled… who shall be humbled and who shall be exalted,” and then the punchline, maybe the most important line of the entire High Holidays: “But repentance, prayer, and charity temper judgment’s sever decree.”

There are acts that we can do to actually reverse, or at least mitigate, our misdeeds. There are steps we can take to address a tarnished legacy. They are three in number and endless in potential: teshuva—repentance; tefilah—prayer; tzedakah—charity.

I could, and should, give a separate sermon on each of the three. Maybe next year. For now, I emphasize one basic point: Legacies are earned, not given. Legacies are an open book, not closed. Legacies are a life-long endeavor, not instant.

It’s not too late to temper the decree. It’s not too late to make repairs by making amends. It’s not too late to add a new chapter.

Besides Yom Kippur, when is another time that we speak about legacies? At funerals, during eulogies. Many, many times I have officiated at the funeral of an ordinary person, who achieved neither fame nor fortune. After all, how many will do that? And some times there is not a great deal for me to say, though I try very hard to listen to the family, and encourage them to speak as well. But other times, I do have a great deal that I can say. And I may need to limit myself because there a line of others who want to talk as well. Again, the person led an ordinary life, career-wise, wealth-wise, accomplishment wise. But the eulogies come pouring forth. You say to yourself: there is something extraordinary happening here. What is it that separates the ordinary from the extraordinary in these modest lives?

Our tradition has a word for it, or rather a phrase: keter shem tov—the crown of a good name.

The one who gave and asked nothing in return. The one who would give the shirt off their back. The one who loved freely and unconditionally.

The one who offered before being asked. The one who stood loyal and tall. The one we called a true mensch.

The one who made mistakes but admitted them. The one whose scowl ended in a smile. The one who laughed not at you but with you.

The full Talmudic teaching says, “There is the crown of royalty; there is the crown of the priesthood; there is the crown of scholarship… but the crown of a good name exceeds them all.”

It’s an extraordinary statement about legacy. Judaism has deep respect for royalty, for clergy, and certainly for scholars. We applaud those who devote themselves to leadership and to learning. The just ruler, the gifted healer, the inspired teacher… these are legacy makers.

But the accumulation of power, prestige, and even scholarship for its own sake—divorced from their ethical moorings—that’s a blot on one’s legacy, whatever the achievement.

Some will merit many crowns, but the one within reach of all exceeds them all. The greatest crown can be worn by the common man. The crown that will make all the difference in how we are remembered. The crown of a good name.

On this Yom Kippur we pause and reflect on the legacy we are already creating and will one day leave behind.

Few of us will be elected to any Hall of Fame save one, the circle of our family and friends.

Swing for the fences; hit a home run. Just make sure there is no asterisk on it.

Happy Sukkot!

As the Jewish holiday season continues with the week-long holiay of Sukkot, Congregation Adas Emuno wishes you all a chag sameach! And here is a fascinating look at Sukkot in Israel, uploaded to YouTube a few years ago:






Truly a celebration for every nation! Join us for our musical Sukkot events this evening, and Friday evening, and for Simchat Torah a week from tonight!

Kol Nidre Coming

Tonight, Yom Kippur begins with Kol Nidre, so to get in the mood, here's a music video from Jew Man Group with a lot of appeal:





And on a more serious note...





On this Yom Kippur eve, as the Days of Awe come to a close, we wish you an easy fast, and G'Mar Chatima Tova!

President Obama's Rosh Hashanah Greeting

While political controversies persist, on the High Holy Days we can set such issues aside and appreciate the fact of the annual greeting posted on YouTube by the President of the United States. So here is this year's Shanah Tovah from President Obama: 





And we can certainly all join together in wishing for a year of peace and continued tikkun olam.

 

The Sanity of Uncertainty

Once again, the Jewish Standard published another op-ed by Adas Emuno president Lance Strate on September 4th, entitled In Defense of Uncertainty. The piece was inspired by a discussion we had at Congregation Adas Emuno one Friday night this summer, led by Rabbi Barry Schwartz, on the subject of the Iran deal. Strong opinions were expressed on both sides, but some of us also admitted that we were unsure of which side of the issue is right (and that's assuming there only are two sides, which is not necessarily the case, and that any side is right or wrong).

So,  here now is the op-ed, with a coda to follow:

If you are expecting yet another op-ed piece arguing for or against President Obama’s Iran deal, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

It’s no secret that the Jewish community has been divided regarding the Iran deal, and the opinions on both sides of the issue by all accounts are strongly held. But there is another great divide regarding this issue, and I believe it is a more significant one: The split between those who have a strong opinion on the issue one way or another, and those who don’t. We often jokingly invoke the equation that two Jews equals three opinions, and in this instance, having no opinion is in fact a third opinion.

At this point you might be expecting me to condemn or criticize those of us who are neither for nor against the Iran deal, or at least urge them to take a stand. If so, I am sorry to disappoint you, but that is not my intention.

I know this is an issue that many feel passionately about, and I respect those people who have taken a stand as a matter of conscience. But in all honesty, I’m not one of them. Let me be clear that it’s not that I don’t care. Far from it. I care deeply. I worry about the future, and I wish I had the certainty about this issue that others seem to possess. But I don’t. And I find myself recalling the words of Pliny the Elder: “The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”

Artist’s Imaginative Rendition of Pliny the Elder

My aim, then, is to defend those of us who are unsure of what the right course of action might be. We may constitute only a small minority of the Jewish community, or maybe we’re a silent majority. Either way, it isn’t easy to break that silence and simply say, “I just don’t know.”

In any heated controversy, the undecideds are subject to a great deal of pressure to get off the fence. After all, neither side is going to persuade the other to give up on the views they so hold fervently, so when they put forth their arguments, who else are they trying to influence? The undecideds are their target. The goals of their persuasive campaigns are twofold: first, to convince us that it’s vital to make up our minds and form an opinion, and second, that we adopt their position rather than the opposing side’s, and take action by communicating that view to our elected officials.

Guilt is a powerful weapon in the war against the undecideds, and it’s not just Jewish guilt at work here. As citizens in a democracy, we are taught that we have a duty to take part in political deliberations, which in turn requires us to be informed about the issues of the day, and to take a position on them.

And if we don’t? Then we have failed to carry out our obligation to participate in the democratic process and are guilty of being bad citizens. The problem is that so many of the issues that we are asked to take a stand on are so complex and so distant from our everyday lives that we have no real basis to form an opinion one way or another. We have access to more information than ever before, but we lack the means to evaluate, filter, and synthesize all that information, so we just wind up with information overload. And however much information we are privy too, there always is more that has been withheld from us, or that has been overlooked.

Feeling compelled to form an opinion as an obligation of citizenship, and unable to do so on our own, we turn to others for guidance. And those others may be sources that reach us through the media. Or they may be people that we know and respect, who themselves have formed their opinions via those same media outlets.

The paradox of needing to have an opinion and having no solid basis for forming one is what makes citizens open and vulnerable to propaganda. And I’m not saying that all propaganda is evil or ill intentioned. After all, the American Revolution was fueled by propaganda, we just substitute the term pamphlets because the term propaganda has a negative connotation for us. It’s just that today, when it is all but impossible to make informed decisions about so many of the issues that we face, propaganda rushes in to fill the void and relieve us of the discomfort of uncertainty.

Some find a sense of certainty by looking to the past. That’s understandable—the past is fixed while the future is always unknown. But I find myself unconvinced by historical comparisons between the Iran deal with the policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany before the Second World War, to America’s Cold War interactions with the Soviet Union, to the embargo of Cuba, to negotiations with North Korea, and so on. While I certainly would agree with the importance of studying and learning from history, simplistic analogies can be terribly misleading. First, whether a particular kind of policy failed or succeeded in the past, there is no way to run a what-if scenario and determine whether another policy would have resulted in a better or worse outcome. But more importantly, the situation today cannot be equated with events from the past. It is unique and has to be evaluated on its own terms.

Some find certainty in fundamental values—peace on the one hand, safety on the other. Values are not the issue, however. The specifics of the settlement are. Does the deal promote peace or increase the possibilities for violence? Does the deal enhance everyone’s safety and security or decrease it? Arguments from both sides appeal to the same values, so the values themselves provide no real basis for taking a stand.

Some find certainty by putting their trust in leaders, whether it’s Barack Obama or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or perhaps it’s more a matter of who they distrust more? But whether one or the other has earned or squandered our trust, ethos alone is not a sufficient basis for evaluating a proposal. Nor is the question of whether we can trust the Iranian leadership, since much of the controversy revolves around our ability to verify their compliance with the conditions of the deal, to enforce restrictions and punish violations.

And so I return to the point that under these circumstances, it’s okay to acknowledge our uncertainty. I want to stress that I am not defending apathy, although I would acknowledge that a sense of numbness is an entirely understandable response to situations that are perceived to be overwhelming. But apathy is simply another form of certainty, the certainty that comes with ignoring or forgetting our concerns.

Living with uncertainty isn’t easy, but it’s something that the Jewish people are accustomed to. Hence the Yiddish saying, “man plans and God laughs.” Sometimes the only certainty is that nothing is certain, and sometimes all that we can do is wait. And hope. And pray.

The following week's edition of the Jewish Standard, published on September 11th, included a letter to the editor from Manfred Weidhorn, Emeritus Guterman Professor of English at Yeshiva University. The editor gave it a title of Strate is Certainly Sane, and here's an image of it as it appeared in the paper:

One final note, on the evening of Rosh Hashanah, we were pleased to have local author and humorist Marvin Kitman with us at Congregation Adas Emuno. After the conclusion of services, he quipped that he had read the op-ed, and wanted to comment on it, but was uncertain as to how he felt about it...