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Living in Two : Doing Jewish in a Non Jewish World 1st , 5780 Steven Lewis

I want to begin with two stories about how a people holds onto its stories.

First from the poet Gary Snyder who tells of going to a conference for Native Alaskan leaders. flies into Anchorage and one of the leaders picks him up at the airport and drives him to the site of the conference several to the north. As soon as they leave the airport, the driver who is very knowledgeable about his tradition, begins to point out features in the landscape and tell traditional stories related to each river and mountain. Snyder comments that he was exhausted by the pace of his guide’s stories, they were told quickly and one immediately after the other. Later he realized that these native myths, linked to the homeland, were traditionally told while walking, not driving, through the landscape.

Second story, probably apocryphal, told by Professor Isaiah Gafni of Hebrew University: A pious in Russia, let’s call him Yankle, is sentenced to the gulag - a harsh remote prison where any religious observance is strictly forbidden. However, Yankle learns that sometimes prisoners are able to smuggle in one small book. Which book should he try to take? So he asks his Rabbi. “If I can take one Jewish book to keep my connection to the tradition, what should I take?” The rabbi tells him: “Take a . If you know when festivals occur, and are keeping days of communal significance with the rest of the Jewish world you can maintain your identity.”

I am going to talk about calendars, the Jewish calendar and THE secular calendar. But I want to start with a question that has no correct answer. In this diverse crowd there will be many different answers. I want to ask you: Do you think of “Jewish” as something you are, or something you do? (And of course you can “do Jewish” without being Jewish - that describes many here who are not Jewish but do Jewish, for example, you’re here.) That’s the question: Is Jewish something you are or something you do?

Back to calendars. We live with extraordinary comfort and freedom compared to our ancestors, but what I want to explore is the challenge we face which is like the challenge of poor Yankle: How to do Jewish in an non-Jewish environment. Our environment is not hostile, like the gulag, but is extremely busy and so doing Jewish requires initiative and planning.

The background is that Jewish life, since the destruction of the Temple in 70AD, is lived in two calendars: the Jewish calendar and the local calendar. (The modern State of is the dramatic exception.) When the Temple was destroyed, the pilgrimages and sacrificial system of biblical religion ended. Rabbinic , replaced biblical Judaism and transformed

1 the practice of a central temple - The Temple, capital T, in - to a new system that could survive in diaspora.

That new Jewish system has lots of prayer and study and mitzvot and acts of loving kindness but no more sacrifices and harvest offerings. No more pilgrimages to Jerusalem. However, one of the key things we took with us into exile was our calendar.

Living in two calendars has always been challenging and complicated. It is challenging and complicated because the calendars are profoundly different. The secular and Jewish calendar are both “calendars” the way solitaire and rugby are both “games” - same category, but extremely different.

I want to take a to talk about the differences. The secular calendar is dominant. In fact, what we call a Jewish calendar is really just a secular calendar with Jewish dates inserted. This leads to all sorts of confusion because, and here’s a first difference between the calendars: despite being in the same box on the calendar, a Jewish day and a secular day do not start and end at the same . Jewish day begins at sundown. Secular day begins a nanosecond after midnight.

You can experience the transition of one Jewish day into the next as a natural phenomenon. We have substantial liturgical tools to mark the transition in the form of the traditional afternoon and evening prayers - good-bye to one day and hello to another. For the secular transition between days you need a , or a giant ball in Time Square. That difference makes the standard Hebrew calendar extremely misleading. Despite this, on the Jewish calendar there’s no introduction and instructions - you’re just supposed to know how to use it. We have a lot of that in Judaism unfortunately - things very few people actually understand but lots of people think they’re supposed to understand. This is one reason why it is so healthy to have lots of people in the community who are not Jewish. They are willing to ask the questions the don’t want to ask because they think they’re supposed to already know the answers.

Another difference between calendars: Secular calendar is solar and Jewish calendar is Lunisolar - meaning a that corrects for the solar . Why lunisolar? A lunar year, twelve lunar cycles, is about eleven days shorter than a solar year. So on a purely lunar calendar, as in the , the festivals are not fixed in any particular but get earlier each year. We have a lunar calendar that corrects to the . This is necessary because we have three central harvest festivals when the tribes would gather to celebrate the harvest in Jerusalem. The three harvest pilgrimage festivals, “Shalosh Regalim,” - , and , are the heart of the Jewish Calendar and they have to stay in the proper season.

2 dates are consistent year to year in relation to the sun; where it rises and sets on the horizon, and how long it is in the sky. Hebrew calendar dates are consistent year to year in relation to the moon. The , on the 14th day of the of Nissan, will always be on the . The festival of Sukkot in two , will always be on a full moon. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Hebrew month of so tonight you might see a tiny sliver of set just before sunset. That moon will wax, getting thicker and setting later each night until it is the full moon of Sukkot- rising at sunset and setting at sunrise. The moon is marking Jewish time. When you see it in the sky, you can guess the day of the Hebrew month.

So to review, 1) Jewish day begins at sundown, 2) calendar is lunisolar so that our harvest festivals stay at harvest-time; but the big difference in the calendars is their purpose and meaning.

The Secular calendar is a tool to help us organize our personal schedules. It is the most useful calendar in because it is nearly universal. In the ancient world, when you went to a new place you needed to adopt the local calendar. Now we can plan a trip across the globe ten from now and expect people will know when we’re arriving to the . The calendar is a platform upon which we can make and share our personal schedules.

If you purchase a secular calendar it will show Columbus Day and Halloween, Christmas and and maybe even major Jewish and Muslim holidays too. Those dates are there to acknowledge events of religious or cultural significance. Maybe it means something to you, maybe not, the secular calendar, on its own terms, has no expectations or demands. The Jewish calendar is different. To demonstrate this difference, let’s do something very Jewish and go back to the first mention of our calendar in the to see what we find.

Exodus chapter twelve. Up until this moment in the Torah we’ve had many many stories and a few genealogies but nothing like a calendar. The story of builds from ’ birth, and the call to free the , through nine plagues and increasing conflict and tension with Pharaoh. God announces the last and most terrible plague and suddenly the action stops and we get something totally new: the Hebrew calendar: The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of the ; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you. Speak to the whole community of Israel and say that on the tenth of this month each of them shall take a lamb to a family, a lamb to a household….. etc. The instructions on what to do on the last night in Egypt and first Passover Seder are given and carried out. But, in case you thought that the Seder was just a one time , the text continues: And when you enter the land that the LORD will give you, as promised, you shall observe this ritual. And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this

3 ritual?’you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, because G-d passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt etc.

So the calendar is established in the biblical text to define obligations, affirm our relationship with the community and the Creator-of-the-Universe and to educate our children about our story. This is the essential element: “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this ritual?’you shall say…” As Sylvia Cohen Religious School student, Emerson Kahle taught at his Bar a few years ago: A calendar allows you to remember events as a way to make sure stories are never lost. If a story is written down it might be destroyed, if it's randomly told, people might forget it, or move on and tell new stories, but a on the calendar when you re-enact and retell, that's what protects the story.

This is most explicit with Passover where our Jewish calendar begins. The Seder ritual is about recounting the story of the Exodus and passing it onto the next generation. The whole elaborate dramatic story: ten plagues, hard-hearted Pharaoh, courageous Moses, the whole story is offered explicitly so that we have an elaborate dramatic story with which to engage the next generation and to find a way to make our communal story their own personal story. That is the name of the game: to find a way to make our communal story the personal story of the next generation.

Of course to do that, it first has to be our personal story. Children are not going to ask ‘What do you mean by this ritual?’ unless they see that it is very important to the people they love. Every event on the Jewish Calendar has specific meanings and invitations to connect to Jewish tradition. The secular calendar is there to serve the individual. The Hebrew calendar is an invitation to connect with family, community, our tradition and with the Source of Life.

The Jewish calendar is our storytelling landscape - like the one I described at the beginning, but rather than mountains and rivers, each day, and season and festival links to part of our Jewish story. And as in that story about the sacred landscape of what we call “,” instead of a walking pace, we’re going at highway speed while trying to feed the kids in the car and return a couple of phone calls on the way. We are trying to do Jewish not on its own terms, but at the relentless pace of the secular calendar.

Negotiating these calendars is hardest on the parents with school-aged children who are managing their own schedules and those of their children. And if you haven’t encountered this, kids’ schedules are ridiculously full and demanding. The pace is fast, the demands are many, and connection to Jewish tradition and “doing Jewish” is one item on a long list of important things. And here comes morning at Sylvia Cohen Religious School and here comes Rosh Hashanah, Kippur Sukkot and and invitation after invitation.

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How can we respond “yes” to yet another invitation? How can we fit in one more thing to our busy schedules? For our Judaism to be successful, it must be countercultural. I don’t think you can fully embrace the pace and values of the dominant culture and have a viable Judaism that fits into the remaining slots. Judaism was, is, and will be inconvenient on the secular calendar.

The Jewish calendar and its stories will only enter into our lives if we make a positive affirmative decision to create time for them to enter our lives. Why might we want to do that? Our secular culture, for all its positive qualities gets some things dramatically and dangerously wrong. A prime example of the countercultural relief provided by our calendar is exactly around this issue of pace. Judaiasm has a different vision of work and pace and an idea that the should be ordered around - putting the cessation of work, and rest, celebration and refreshment at the center. Our freedom and holiness are celebrated not by doing more and more, but by slowing down and focusing on the essentials of our lives.

Speaking of freedom, in our culture, as I’ve preached many mainly in connection with the plague of gun violence in our country, the corruption and idolatry of freedom as an end in itself. This is another place where Jewish life offers a different more mature and healthy perspective. Our society treats freedom as a transcendent value to the point where even deadly destructive behaviors are seen as sacrosanct because we can hardly challenge an individual’s right to do what they want, regardless of its effect on the community. The freedom of an individual therefore, is more important than our safety because we worship the false god of freedom.

Our culture is intensely individualistic and lacking an ethic of communality. Strong community commitment and support are essential for the well-being of individuals and families. And yet, our cultural norm is to celebrate the individual disconnected from their community - as if we can create ourselves and thrive independent of all social and family structures. In this context not only are greed and selfishness expected norms, they are celebrated as ideals. Imagine a person who is wealthy and somehow “self made” (perhaps becoming an entrepreneur after being raised by wolves) and never said thank you or lifted a finger to help anyone, one who made her money off of something useless or harmful. In our culture, that person is considered a great success and treated like a hero.

Inconvenient as it is, I am grateful for the gift of our tradition’s teachings that help us envision a healthier path. I am grateful for the cumbersome calendar that creates structure to affirm and guide us on that path. Our task, if we want to be living in the tradition and doing Jewish, is to help pass it onto the next generation.

At this and the Sylvia Cohen Religious School, we are working to create a deep, meaningful and joyous experience of connecting to Jewish tradition. And to be clear, by “we” I

5 mainly mean Phoebe Potts and her team of teachers. But we are moving very fast through the calendar. Children’s services for Rosh Hashanah 5780 are already in the rear view mirror. This is a profound challenge and since we’re a large group here today I want to tell you that while our school families are the most squeezed by the demands of competing calendars, we are all involved and responsible. As in any evolution, what we pass to the next generation is the name of the game. When we’re doing Jewish together, the whole community is creating the positive learning environment, and positive experience of growing up Jewish that is essential for the tradition to grow and evolve. Phoebe’s tag line for the school is “Helping families raise Jewish children” but that’s not just the school’s project, that could be all of us, whether we have children in the school or not.

It is wonderful and essential that our students see adults studying Torah, learning Hebrew, being called to the Torah for adult bat mitzvah, helping in the kitchen, playing in the Alle Brieder band, showing up to sing and pray together, engaging in social action and political protest. Youth have an uncanny sense of what is real and true and if they feel that they’re suffering to carry on a tradition that no one really cares much about, they are not likely to be interested. The model given in our Torah is that the child ask: “What is this ritual that is so important to you?” You don’t want the child to ask: “Why are you making me do this thing no one cares about?” I want you to know that if you care about Judaism and this synagogue community then you are a part of the project of passing our tradition to the next generation. I want you to know that you showing up is essential. To be clear, I am not recruiting cheerleaders or endorsing a propaganda campaign. “Showing up” can be to figure out honestly what, if anything this tradition means to you. I want us to be learning together if and how a liberal egalitarian Jewish community in Glouceter can be sustainable.

If you want to connect more with doing Jewish and with this community that will require some planning ahead. A great thing about the Jewish calendar - it’s yours. We have a big stack downstairs, take one! Last week we recycled about 100 of the calendars from 5779. This year I hope these will get some more use. People will say to me “Oh I really wanted to come to this year, or the Seder or Musical Kabbalat Shabbat… but we got tickets to see a show or our friends are coming into town. Dinner reservations. Perhaps if we put some important things on the calendar early, we could avoid that experience. Along with the calendar, take a sheet that provides the dates we are trying to gather with all of the school families, and hopefully, with the whole community. First up on the list is the second day of Sukkot when we’ll have a veggie potluck and perhaps watch the full moon rise together.

The Shalosh Regalim (“three pilgrimage festivals”) that I called the Heart of the Jewish Calendar are described several times each in the Torah and there is also the injunction repeated that “Three times a year you are supposed to gather.” The final repetition of this reads:

6 Three times a year—on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Weeks, and on the Feast of Booths—[everyone with agency] (“all your males”) shall appear before the LORD your God in the place that God will choose. They shall not appear before the LORD empty-handed, but each with their own gift, according to the blessing that the LORD your God has bestowed upon you. (Deut 16:16-17)

The Shalosh Regalim were a special kind of embodied celebration we no longer have. But I know that we could be making celebration and coming together more central to the experience of synagogue participation. This is the direction we’re moving at Sylvia Cohen Religious School - large celebratory gatherings as part of our religious life. In addition to “High Holiday Jews” who come for Rosh haShanah and , it would be great to have some “Shalosh Regalim Jews” who organize parties around the festivals and lead us in the more embodied and celebratory aspects of our tradition.

Please take a sheet with a list of our upcoming gatherings and celebrations and a calendar and see if you can join us. Don’t come empty handed: come with your caring and love, your questions and doubts and your Jewish baggage. Come with the gifts of your curiosity and willingness to connect with our tradition and this community. l’Shanah Tovah tikatayvu - may you be inscribed for a good year of positive changes.

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