Here’s a link to YouTube if you’d prefer to watch!
Jewish tradition is clear on the importance of hachnasat orchim, the mitzvah of hospitality. Hamakom has done it’s share and then some! Welcome banners, balloons, videos of our arrival. My face on banners. My face on posters. My face on electronic displays throughout the building…. Please know, I am truly grateful for the incredible efforts this congregation undertaken to extend a powerfully warm welcome to me personally—and to Miriam, Eliyah and Shamir. Truly grateful… and just a little embarrassed.
If you’ll allow, it all reminds me a bit of Rabbi Don Goor formerly of Temple Judea here in Tarzana who once told a story about being invited to a congregant’s home for sukkot. When Rabbi Goor walked into the man’s sukkah, he was bemused to find the sukkah decorated on all sides with pictures of himself—Rabbi Goor. Don was honored but uncertain as to why the congregants had done this. When he inquired, they responded, “this is the first year we’ve built a sukkah, and we weren’t sure what to do. Our friends attend Chabad, and they put pictures of their rabbi all around their sukkah!...”
So, while it’s an honor to see the posters and banners, it’s especially nice to see each other today, in three dimensions, face-to-face.
Shall we learn some Torah? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages…it speaks in every language and in every age…In fact, it is still in the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its content having hardly touched the thresholds of our minds; like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie, waiting to be discovered” (God in Search of Man, p. 242).
We call Torah an Etz Chayim, a living tree. And it’s true, it is always growing and, as it does, it shapes us, grows with us throughout the generations. But Torah is also a treasure trove to be mined, or an ocean to be explored. We dive deep into its waters, claiming those pearls, applying its timeless wisdom to new contexts. We grow when we learn the lessons of our tradition in relationship to contemporary questions or challenges.
This feels like a worthy message on this, the Semiquincentennial of our country, America’s 250th birthday. There is much to love about this country, its beautiful landscapes as my family and I recently experienced, its commitment to our basic freedoms and representative democracy, the hamburger. But what I love best about America, and what is in some ways the most Jewish thing about this country, is the foundation of basic human equality upon which the nation was founded when the 2nd Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
I’ve served three congregations in my years as a rabbi. The first one, Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago, features striking stained-glass windows in its historic sanctuary, including in a ceiling skylight. Included are the words “All men are created equal” in English, words from the Declaration. But immediately above these are Hebrew words from Bereishit: “na’aseh adam b’tzalmeinu kidemuteinu, let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness.” The implication of course, the midrashic move if you will, is that America’s promise of equality is rooted in Torah values, the radical Jewish concept that each of us is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image, and is therefore deserving of honor and dignity.
This is no accident in that the founding fathers were largely Hebraophiles, wishing to root the American experiment in what they saw as Christian Old Testament values and the Bible’s frequent call to justice, fairness, dignity, and prosperity. Now, if we’re being honest, Jefferson’s language was not as expansive or inclusive as I hope most of us believe our country should be in embracing human equality. In 1776 and long after, “equality” did not include, for example, women, people of African descent—even we Jews were not afforded de jure, full equal protection under the law until many, many years year. And today, there continue to be many societal inequities worth working to correct or improve.
But what I want to suggest to you today is that that is exactly why this anniversary is so important, so powerful. Because America, like Jewish tradition, is not only about the human being, but the human becoming. What we are is an invitation to who we might be. There are legal systems, political systems, social stratifications in the world which insist large segments of their societies are trapped in their station, defined inexorably by their race or gender or caste.
This, I believe, is not what America stands for. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Not only being but becoming, pursuing.
And Torah, too, unfurls itself to us, revealing an internal Jewish struggle to live up to the principle of tzelem Elohim. Our parasha includes the b’not Tzlophehad, five daughters who come to Moses with a claim of unfair practices.
תְּנָה־לָּ֣נוּ אֲחֻזָּ֔ה בְּת֖וֹךְ אֲחֵ֥י אָבִֽינוּ׃
“Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen,” they demand (Num. 27:4). It is unfair that just because we have no brothers, our family’s property should pass to another! And what’s amazing about this passage is that when Moshe brings the case to the Kadosh Baruch Hu, God insists not only that the b’not Tzlophehad get their due, but establishes a new legal precedent based on their claim. “Further, speak to the Israelite people as follows: ‘If a man dies without leaving a son, you shall transfer his property to his daughter’” (v. 8).
Humans becoming, society evolving based on a clear founding principle – equality. It’s this principle embedded in the Declaration of Independence that has led Americans to push for a what the constitution calls “a more perfect union.” In 1852, nine years before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist who made his home in my previous home of Baltimore, delivered a speech in honor of Independence Day. His remarks draw on the tradition of the ancient prophets who call upon us to uphold our values, of Tzelophehad’s daughters who insist halacha abide by Torah’s own first principles.
Douglass doesn’t in any way reject the Declaration of Independence” Rather, in the spirit of American pursuit of happiness, he claims it in the name of a brighter future. “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men,” he says. “They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age…. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
And then Douglass admits with great sadness the truth of 1852, of a man who escaped slavery, but whose brothers and sisters remain in bondage. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary!... The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me…. This Fourth July is yours, not mine….” Nevertheless, says Douglass, “I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.” His quote is from Isaiah 59 (v. 1). He’s prophetic; Sure enough, eleven years later Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. And by June 19, 1865, American slavery was at an end.
America is a land of becoming because the project of America is one that makes reinvention, reimagination possible. That’s why so many Jews came here, to Hollywood, making movies to tell stories both about an America they loved and also about an America they hoped would become more fully realized. That’s how Jewish poet Emma Lazarus was able to reimagine an enormous statue in New York Harbor, a gift of liberty presented by the French on July 4, 1884, but which Lazarus understood to stand for immigrants seeking a better life. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Her poem, written one year prior, would remake Lady Liberty as a beacon of welcome for people like my grandfather who would come to flee Nazi Germany in 1938. But in 1883, the same year Emma Lazarus penned “The New Colossus,” she also wrote a series of articles titled “An Epistle to the Hebrews” in which she coined the phrase: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Lazarus was concerned in that essay about Jewish complacency, that comfortable and assimilated American Jews were not sufficiently concerned with the plight of suffering Eastern European Jewry and the repatriation of our fellow people not only to America but also to Eretz Yisrael. “I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not “tribal” enough;” she wrote, “we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated.”
To enjoy the freedoms of America is not to disappear into some great melting pot. And it’s not to insist everything is perfect. It’s to celebrate the many wonderful things about this country, now a quarter of a millenium old. And it’s to honor the diverse and rich humanity which pulsates through this great nation. This Independence Day, may we seek to be and become, to confront our past not with shame but curiosity and love of a country that has given our people so much. May we continue to insist on the call to equality enshrined in our Declaration of Independence.
And Hamakom, as we begin our new journey together, may I be worthy of the values that undergird this wonderful community. We too are in a process of becoming, and I’m so very excited to see where we go from here!
