Clergy Blog

Shabbat Shalom!

I hope you are enjoying this holiday weekend amongst your family and friends. The confluence of July 4th and Shabbat gives us an opportunity to reflect on what it means to be American Jews today. Each generation of Jews in this country have had significant milestones and challenges. Our present is shaped by those who came before us and took a chance at making it in the goldene medina (the Golden Land). 

This July 4th, I encourage you to take some time to reflect on your own family’s story of arrival to the US. What brought them or you here? What was their journey like? In what ways are you the inheritor of their story?

I’m sharing below my d’var torah that I will offer at tonight’s service. If you are joining us on the Singer-Krause patio at 6:30pm tonight, I would encourage self-restraint to hear it live! If not, please feel free to read below about an important yet overlooked figure in American Jewish history.

Tonight is also Cantor Emily Simkin’s first Shabbat service at B’nai Abraham. I am so looking forward to her guiding us through our service, and on behalf of the community, extend the warmest welcome to her, her husband Adam, and their son Tal. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Max

****

D’var Torah: Parashat Chukat 5785

On July 4th, 1776, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA, our American ancestors adopted the Declaration of Independence, formally embarking on a new, perilous, and necessary path of self-determination. Not long after this foundational moment, British forces sought to topple this colonies’ newly proclaimed self-rule. They launched a massive campaign beginning on Long Island and made their way toward New York City in the hopes of recapturing the strategic port. By August, as the British were approaching the City, the Continental Army began to flee north. 

Gershom Mendes Seixas, the spiritual leader of Shearith Israel, New York’s only synagogue, had a decision to make: 

Should his Jewish community compromise on their morals, stay in the city, surrender to the British, and seek protection from the King’s army? 

Or, do they leave? Surrendering the comforts of their surroundings but not their morals by fleeing and refusing allegiance to the country that had subjugated them for decades.

If the contours of this story sound familiar, that’s because this moral dilemma is biblical. The British punk band the Clash summed it up best in their most famous song: Should I stay or should I go? In the story of the Exodus from Egypt, it was less, should I stay or should I go, and more, should I stay or should we go back? 

We joke about the grumblings and the complaints of the Israelites as they wandered for forty years toward the promised land, but in reality, wandering, and distance from the only place one knows as home, even if it’s for the best of causes, like fleeing generations of slavery under an evil tyrant, is no easy task. 

In this week’s parasha, Chukat, we encounter the scene of Moses striking a rock, twice, to provide water for the Israelite community. What precipitated this episode was a complaint from the Israelites themselves toward Moses and Aaron: 

“Why have you brought God’s congregation into this wilderness for us and our beasts to die there? Why did you make us leave Egypt to bring us to this wretched place, a place with no grain or figs or vines or pomegranates? There is not even water to drink!”

God tells Moses to order a certain rock to yield water for the community. But instead, Moses yells at the Israelites, calls them rebels, and strikes the rock twice, at which point water begins to flow. 

In a tragic twist to the end of this section, God tells Moses and Aaron that because of their inability to trust in God, they will not complete the journey to the Promised Land and will die in the wilderness. What exactly did Moses do wrong? Was it the fact that he struck the rock, twice at that, instead of speaking to it? Was it his harsh language toward the Israelites? The rabbis have much to say, but the Torah is silent on the reasoning behind this act of God. One thing, however, is clear: The wilderness, that middle ground between what one leaves behind and where one ends up, is a dangerous place to inhabit.  

This has been the Jewish dilemma for thousands of years: Do we stay loyal to the ruling authorities with the hope that our loyalty will engender our protection? Or do we leave the familiar for the unknown and seek deliverance from another corner of our world? Risking ourselves in the wilderness for as long as it takes to reach the other side. 

Egypt, Babylon, Rome, the Russian Empire, Spain, Morocco, Iran, Yemen, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Germany. When a Jew hears the names of these countries and regimes, we may think of their various cultural contributions to society or the fond memories of the generations before us. Though eventually, those memories were often accompanied by stories of flight, sometimes persecution, and very often a journey into the unknown. 

Long before the state of Israel was established in 1948 as a mechanism to put the agony of Jewish flight to rest, Jews sought refuge in America behind the principles of the revolution. It was not a perfect match, but the principles of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the idea of natural, indelible rights proved to be powerful magnets for Jews and so many others around the world. Jews have thrived in America like perhaps no other modern nation state or global empire. We have a debt that we owe to this country for welcoming so many of our ancestors whose lineages might not have made it to us, were it not for New York harbor.  

And it is precisely because of those revolutionary principles that have allowed Jews in America, unlike so many other countries and regimes, to simultaneously live, criticize, prosper, and critique this country freely, without fear that our political or religious opinions will in any way endanger our status as Americans. I’m not sure Jews, or many other minority group for that matter, feel the same freedom or the same protections that we felt even a few years ago, but I do know that we still have much to celebrate, not because of what the reality around us currently is, but because of what it was, and therefore what it can be.  

Gershom Mendes Seixas did end up fleeing New York with most of the Shearith Israel community up to Connecticut in August of 1776. They carried with them a Torah scroll, the physical embodiment of our people, other ritual objects necessary for a portable Jewish community, and the hope that one day they may be able to return home. They returned to New York in 1784, a year after British forces evacuated the city. They returned to a vandalized and defiled, though not destroyed synagogue. They brought back their Torah scroll and discovered the burned remains of a Torah they left behind, still in existence today and kept by the New York Historical Society. The decision to leave New York could not have been easy. While the British army was most literally marching in their direction, the Shearith Israel community certainly had to have imagined the possibility that they would never return home.  

Even in this moment of political division and rising antisemitism, we are nonetheless guaranteed the rights to worship, congregate, and to be politically and religiously free, simply by living here. But it wasn’t handed to us in 1776. It was fought for by our Jewish ancestors who have lived here since 1654 and who set the table for what would be codified as religious freedom and civil liberties. On July 4th, we celebrate the stories like Gershom Mendes Seixas and the Shearith Israel community, still very much in existence today. Those Jews who had the moral courage to choose principle over fear and who had a vision that would shape generations to come. Seixas would become the Jewish leader in this period - he was 1 of 14 clergymen chosen to attend Washington’s inauguration in 1789, and his voice was instrumental in legitimizing religious freedom for all peoples in our newly founded republic. May his legacy inspire us to uphold the same freedoms that he and those who came before us fought for.