Beth Am at Forty and Our “Akiva” Moment* *A Fire and Brimstone Sermon Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg Parashat Miketz – Shabbat Hanukkah 5775 December 20, 2014

Arguably the greatest rabbinic sage in Jewish history was Rabbi Akiva. It’s said that he came from a family of converts, was of the humblest financial means and was entirely illiterate; well into adulthood he didn’t even know his Aleph-Bet! Once when he was forty years old and during the rainy season, he was walking by a well and noticed a depression in one of the stones. “Who hollowed out this stone?” he asked a passerby. Said the other, “When water is drawn from the well, some of it drips on this stone. Day after day, year after year, the water carved out this depression.” Akiva marveled: “If what is soft wears down the hard, what about Torah whose words are hard as iron; how much the more so could Torah hollow out my heart which is flesh and blood?” So his wife Rachel sold her hair to raise funds and Akiva, at forty years old, began his life of Torah study (ARN Ch.6).

This weekend is very much about Beth Am’s story. Many of you know our story, were a part of kindling the initial flame on that Shabbat Hanukkah forty years ago. Others of you have cultivated the fire, ensuring it would increase day after day, year after year, having a lasting impact like the water in Rabbi Akiva’s tale. And while we, in 5775, are surely not starting from zero, this ought to be a point of reflection. So take a moment to consider your part in the Beth Am story. What has the shul, this community, meant to you? What have you meant to it? How have your fellow congregants been there for you… and you for them? When have you laughed, listened or learned? If these stones could talk, what is the story they would tell? Hanukkah is a perfect time to focus on Beth Am’s past and future as well – the inspiring and even somewhat miraculous story of this building and these people.

The second beracha we say each night of Hanukkah is…sh’asah nisim l’avoteinu bayamim hahem bazman hazeh, which can be interpreted in one of two ways: “who created miracles for our ancestors in those days, at this season” – which is about the past or “who created miracles for our ancestors in those days, and in this time” – which is about the present and how it inevitably flows into the future. We know each year as we celebrate the miracle of Jewish survival, that God, and we, God’s human partners, are somehow creating miracles in “our time” and, it stands to reason, will continue to do so next year and in the years beyond. You know the song: “In every age a hero or sage came to our aid.” So Hanukkah is about the enduring covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people: then, now and forever. Such is our prayer for Beth Am.

But today, this morning, I don’t want to focus mainly on our unfolding story, our past or our future. Today I want to reflect on this moment, not as a milestone on a journey, but as a liminal moment. Because today is also Shabbat, and unlike Hanukkah, Shabbat is about the eternal present; it’s a time

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without time, beyond time. And perhaps nothing better represents this “eternal now” than the specific birthday we celebrate this Shabbat.

The number forty is one of the most potent numbers in Jewish tradition. Efrem Potts calls it the “catch all” number. Think about it. How many days and nights did the rain fall on Noah’s ark? Forty. How many years did our ancestors wander in the desert? Forty. And that punishment was due to their failure to bring an honest report from their espionage in Canaan. How many days were those spies doing their reconnaissance? That’s right, forty. And how many days did Moshe spend on Mt. Sinai? Eighty! – Forty the first time and forty the second time: Arbaim yom v’arbaim lailah, “forty days and forty nights.”

You get the picture. Forty is a transitional number, a watershed number, a number than signifies moving from one stage to another or in one direction instead of another. When the Torah wishes to set the maximum number of lashes allowed to punish one who has committed a significant but non- capital offense, the number of lashes is forty (Deu. 25:3). Forty lashes transition the criminal from guilt to the next stage of repentance. When the Mishnah comes along later and makes it thirty-nine, Chazal are careful to derive their ruling from the accepted biblical number: arbaim chaser ahat, it says, “forty minus one” (Makkot 3:6). So too, when the Mishnah wishes to delineate the rules of Shabbat, the number is not thirty-nine but “forty minus one” (Shabbat 7:2), “forty minus one” prohibitions that effectuate a meaningful shift from hol to kodesh, from the ordinary week to the sacred day of rest. Forty is the benchmark.

And there are more examples. The Talmud states that an embryo takes on a different status at forty days. There are forty days between the first of Elul and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement which fully transitions us from one year to the next. And forty seah of natural “living” water are required for a mikvah, perhaps the transitional ritual par excellence. Forty is clearly the number of change and evolution, of closing a door and then opening a window.

So, when a person or a shul turns forty years old, what’s that meaning of that birthday? For people, forty has a special designation: Ben arbaim l’bina, we are taught (Pirkei Avot 5:25). Forty is the age of understanding. Forty is special. It’s not a beginning, but it’s far from the end. It’s a middle number from which people, or perhaps a beit am, a “house of the people”, should have a healthy perspective on their past and a sober assessment of their future. We have learned but know there is more to learn. We have built but know there is much yet to build. Forty is a pivotal moment between the extremes; it’s a place from which we can truly appreciate Kohelet’s observation that there’s “a time for planting and a time for uprooting…a time for weeping and a time for laughing…a time for wailing and a time for dancing…a time for seeking and a time for losing…eit lachashot v’eit l’daber, a time for silence and a time for speaking….”

Forty is about “understanding.” Perhaps this is the reason one traditionally begins to study Kabbalah at age forty, a stringency reinforced in the aftermath of the false messiah Shabbtai Tzvi in the seventeenth century. Kabbalah, of course, is Jewish mysticism, and the mystical urge is fraught

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with power and danger. God, among other things, is likened to a consuming fire, an aish ochlah (Deu. 4:24), and one can only draw near to something that potent when one is prepared, experienced and grounded in the stuff of life and living. That’s why the greatest kabbalists were also frequently great halakhists, legal scholars, because their mystical exploration was rooted and deliberate …even strategic.

Rabbi Akiva is one of the best examples of a sage who was able to fully integrate his halakhic and kabbalistic selves. It’s no accident that he was forty years old when he noticed the water-hewn rock, forty when he transitioned to a life of Torah. Akiva was a deeply analytical thinker. It was his structure and teachings that formed the bedrock of what we know as the Mishnah; his influence would literally alter the course of Jewish history and thought. Later authorities compared him to Moshe Rabbeinu! But Rabbi Akiva was also a mystic. So great was his metaphysical understanding he could ascend to the heavenly heights and, unlike his colleagues, return unscathed.

And perhaps because he was forty, he understood one must seize the gift of liminality, unleash the potential energy of the transitional moment: I’ll let Torah into my heart, he thought. “Growth doesn’t happen on its own, you see. One stage of life may end, but it’s up to us to begin the next.” We must, to paraphrase Churchill, meet the end of the beginning with yet another beginning. At the core of any mystical journey is active engagement. It’s having the chutzpah to say God’s world, such as it is, has been entrusted to us, and we, like Akiva, must make it better by first making ourselves better and then working outward in space and forward in time. A story illustrates the point: Once, the Roman magistrate Tinnius Rufus, looking to delegitimize the rite of circumcision, said to Rabbi Akiva: "Which is the more beautiful, God's work or man's?” fully expecting the rabbi to box himself in by answering, “God’s.” "Undoubtedly man's work is the better," was Akiva's reply; "for while nature at God's command supplies us only with the raw material, human skill enables us to embellish it with art and good taste." Flustered, Rufus retorted: "Why, then, has God not made man just as He wanted him to be?" "For the very reason," said Rabbi Akiva, "that the duty of man is to perfect himself" (Tan., Tazri'a, 5, ed. Buber 7).

Akiva, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for creating a viable transition from sacrificial to rabbinic Judaism. He’s the one who interprets the tagin, the crowns on the Torah’s letters which the rabbis claim were left there specifically for him. He’s the one who corrects Moses himself as the latter sits dumbfounded in the back of his yeshiva. These midrashim and others combine to make a critical point, a kabbalistic point: standing on the threshold of forty is to pivot from more passive to more active, to shift our focus from the inherited tradition to creating an inheritance for those to come.

And is this not Beth Am at forty? Anyone could be taught that water is capable of boring through solid rock, and surely anyone could be the rock itself! It takes introspection and gumption to stand at the watershed with a renewed sense of purpose. Any shul, my friends, can celebrate a fortieth birthday. Yes, Beth Am’s survival was hardly a given at its inception, and there certainly have been some bumps in the road, but simply turning forty, in my mind, isn’t worth a huge celebration. Ben

3 arbaim l’bina, reaching one’s fifth decade with understanding, with a mission and plans for the future, that is the magic of forty done right!

And to do this, to mark not just a transitional moment, but an “Akiva” moment, to know the rock’s purpose and potential, we must first understand where it comes from. A geology lesson: Rock is formed in different ways and one way, as you probably know, is lava, essentially molten rock which spews from beneath the earth's crust, cools and then hardens. What do lava and igneous rock have to do with spirituality? My answer comes from a modern Benedictine monk in New York, by way of a rabbinic colleague in Los Angeles. Such is the way of the world. The monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, had an epiphany about lava while in Hawaii. He observed that great religions in their inception were like volcanic eruptions. They brought heat and light, galvanizing seeking people and united them in purposeful communities. "The light of doctrine," he writes, "the flow of ethical commitment, and the fire of ritual celebration were expressions that gushed red hot from the depths of mystical consciousness."

The problem, of course, is that the original lava became ossified and the farther it got from its fiery origins, the less inspiring, the less spiritually fulfilling, it became. The task of religious organizations, of synagogues, is to balance between tradition, the ritual container we’ve constructed to hold the fire, and innovation, the ways we ferret out cracks in the surface and tap into the liquid magma below. So let me brag about Beth Am for a moment, because while there are certainly lots of wonderful meaning-making shuls out there, there are even more shuls around the country who are just stuck, who are so far from their own institutional origins or their Jewish origins they simply cannot be fluid or agile and therefore they struggle to be relevant. They become cold, and hard and ultimately alienating to the very people they serve.

But not Beth Am. We have our faults, to be sure, but irrelevant, alienating – these are not the story of us. On one hand we’re closer to the source; we’re only forty. Many of you still remember those formative moments and others bask in the glow of your recollections. But surely it’s not just that. My friends, there is lava in these stones; there is fire within these walls! These menorahs have not ceased to shine! You know the particulars, the programmatic details, and if you don’t I’ll gladly tell you another time. For now, let me say this: the bold choices and vision of our leaders and the love and support of our members have led us inexorably to this glorious moment – our Akiva moment. We, like that stone, have been shaped by our past. But we, like Rabbi Avika, understand the potential of this hour.

Last night we rekindled the flames of Hanukkah; tonight we’ll rededicate ourselves to the next forty years and beyond. But today, right now isn’t for rekindling or rededication. Today we rejoice. Today we commit to the ongoing act of improving ourselves, this place, our community, this neighborhood and this city. Today is our fortieth birthday. Can you see the path before us? Can you feel the tremors of a coming eruption beneath our feet? I can. Yom Huledet Sameach my fellow Beth Am’ers. Ad meah v’esrim…and then some.

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